


No Angel

by saraph



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dripping in Angst, F/F, Outdoor Sex, POV Alternating, Plot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Drama, Suicide Attempt, Talon does actual terrorism, Tortured love story, What is Death?, What is Morality?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-05-18 13:40:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14853842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saraph/pseuds/saraph
Summary: She was a doctor, a healer, the kind of woman destined to give all that she had and all that she was to others. She had a kind smile and a laugh like music and she had seen enough death and bloodshed to last a thousand lifetimes. Yet she was never more beautiful than she was on the battlefield, her shoulders bowed beneath mechanical wings and the weight of the world.One night, Mercy falls into the clutches of Talon, and must sacrifice everything to save her own soul. One night, Moira is asked to do the impossible for a woman she once loved.This is the story of how their paths cross again, in the most desperate of times.





	1. Angela (It Would Be Mercy)

**Author's Note:**

>  

_“I must go where I am needed.”_

 

     There was a suicide pill tucked into a secret compartment in the collar of her Valkyrie suit. A pretty blue thing, wrapped in polymer, positioned just so that she could reach it even if her hands were bound. In case the mission failed. In case everything went wrong. In case she was alone, disarmed, with no way out and nowhere left to turn.

     There was always a pill, in the recalled Overwatch’s missions against Talon. Ever since they had seen what had become of Amélie LaCroix, there had always been a pill.

 

*****

 

**Lijiang Tower, Chongqing, China. Present day.**

     She was a doctor, a healer, the kind of woman destined to give all that she had and all that she was to others. She had a kind smile and a laugh like music and she had seen enough death and bloodshed to last a hundred lifetimes. Yet she was never more beautiful than she was on the battlefield, her shoulders bowed beneath mechanical wings and the weight of the world.

     Angela remembered –

     An hour to midnight, the lobby of Lijiang Tower, the team under attack, Talon closing in. Bullets arced through the night, dust and plaster and shrapnel falling through the air like rain. There was Reinhardt, brave old Reinhardt, chuckling like a madman and holding down his shield at the main entrance even as cracks spider-webbed through the hard light barrier. Lena and Genji, twin flashes of blue and green in the melee. And Ana, unflappable as ever, crouched down and taking potshots at the enemy outside.

     Another day, another battle. Except -

     She remembered the screaming, when it began.

     The screaming of innocent civilians outside, caught in paramilitary crossfire in the middle of a crowded city. There were men’s, women’s, children’s voices – the Talon agents were firing indiscriminately. After years of working in war zones, refugee camps, the worst conflict areas in the world, Angela knew those screams all too well. She heard them in her dreams. Each voice was an endless reminder of a time she had failed, a life she had let slip through her grasp.

 _She was needed._ Reflexively, she made to dash towards the side exit.

     “Angela – no!” cried Genji, materializing next to her and seizing her arm. “It’s too dangerous! There are too many of them out there! They’ll be on you in seconds!”

     “I have to help,” she shouted at him, trying desperately to pull free. She had made him well - his mechanical grip was like steel. “There are innocent people dying out there!” she pleaded. “They’re dying because of us. This is our fight, not theirs. I can help them. I can save them with my staff. Let me go!”

     “It’s no use,” Genji roared. “We need you alive! Don’t try to play the hero, Angela!”

     Let me go!” shouted Angela. “I must do this. I must. Hold down the point. I’ll be back in a minute, no more. I swear it.” And with an immense effort she tore herself free, running out into the night, Genji’s dismayed shouts trailing in her wake.

     She would only be a minute, she told herself. With Ana’s healing, they could survive without her for a minute.

     There were bodies in the courtyard. At least a dozen strangers’ bodies, crumpled to the ground or struggling desperately in the sparse pools of light. Blood pooled on the sidewalks in small lakes. The scene was like something out of Angela’s worst nightmares. This was beyond a war crime. This was a bloodbath, a slaughter, an act of terror. An atrocity.

     Angela raised her staff, directing the yellow nanites towards the first of the crying, shuddering figures. A teenage girl prone on the ground, no older than sixteen, her hair matted with blood, her abdomen shredded with bullet wounds. _Heal_ , Angela commanded, kneeling over her fallen form, and the Caduceus staff lit up the night.

     Suffused with a golden glow, the Chinese girl pulled herself into a sitting position. “ _Xiaoxin!_ ” she gasped hoarsely, coughing blood and gesturing faintly towards Angela. “ _Ni shenhou_ …”

     “Shh,” Angela tried to quiet her, medic training taking over. Another innocent, dying in her arms. How many times had this scene played out in her life? “Stay calm for me,” she instructed, keeping her voice low and soothing. “It’s going to be alright. You’re going to be alright.”

     And in her focus on her chosen patient, she failed to hear the footsteps, the clink of a pin being pulled, something being thrown -

          and then -

 _fire, a bloom of searing heat,_  
_concussive blast that set the world silently ringing in her ears_  
_she was flying, flying through the night with her wings dangling and torn from her back_

     The grenade sent Angela into the wall of the courtyard with shattering force. Her back slammed into the unyielding concrete with a force that she thought must have fractured every bone in her body. Alerts flashed across her vision; broken ribs, a punctured lung. Her Caduceus staff and blaster were knocked clean out of her hands and across the yard. She collapsed to the ground, gasping, as her internal nanites began the grisly work of stitching her back together. It wouldn’t be fast enough.

     Unconsciousness prickled at the corners of her vision but she rallied, dragging herself up to her knees, desperately trying to get back to her feet -

     There was a hiss of rope – a grappling hook unwinding – and then someone dropped on her from above. A sharp-heeled boot slammed into the base of her neck, forcing back down to the ground. Then another foot kicked brutally at her ruined chest, rolling her over onto her back. Angela blinked at the moonlit sky for a few moments, before her dazed eyes focused on the dozen Talon soldiers that formed a ring around her.

_It was a trap. It was all a trap for me._

     The realization chilled Angela to her core. Looking around the courtyard now, it was all too clear. The civilians, lined up and shot nonlethally - in the stomach, in the leg - to draw her out with their cries. The shock grenade, to incapacitate her when she inevitably, blindly, foolishly rushed out to try and help them.

     The girl, who had tried to warn her, and who was now lying in a silent heap in the middle of the grass. Orange flames licked gently at her clothes.

 _You sick bastards!_  Angela wanted to scream. She wanted to spit at them, to shout for help from her teammates, but her lungs had been knocked empty. She could only gasp and cough up blood onto the gravel path.

 _Playing the hero_ , Genji had said. A goddamned hero, shot down in her hubris. The trap had been artfully sprung. Someone knew her well.

     “That is her,” pronounced the one in the lead, the one who had kicked her. “Our target. Mercy herself.”

     Angela realized that Talon did not care a thing about the objective at Lijiang, the objective that her friends were still so stalwartly defending. She, Mercy, had been the target all along. The battle, the bloodshed – it had all been to lure her out and capture her. And, like an unsuspecting bird, she had waltzed right into their cage.

_But… that voice. That accent._

     Angela tried desperately to focus her streaming eyes. Who was that? Who had spoken? Raising her head, she caught sight of a long black ponytail, a gleaming catsuit, a pair of narrow amber eyes.

     Amélie LaCroix?

     It couldn’t be. _It couldn’t be!_ And yet it was.

     The last time Angela Ziegler had seen her, so many years ago, Amélie had been but a girl. A beautiful, quiet, aristocratic sort of girl, she remembered, always hanging on the arm of her husband Gerard. She had been a fine athlete and dancer. Angela had heard Ana and Jack speak of inviting her to Overwatch as an agent, but it never came to that. Gerard wouldn’t hear of it.

_Does she even remember us? Remember me? Doubtful, now that she’s Talon’s pawn. Mein Gott, what did they do to her?_

     Horror and bile welled up in her throat. Angela tried to speak, tried to say something to Amélie, but only managed a hoarse rasp. She hadn’t the strength to resist when the Talon soldiers hauled her upright and bound her wrists in blue hard light manacles. One of them strode to the other side of the courtyard and collected her Caduceus staff from where it lay, mangled and in ruins.

     An unfamiliar dropship swooped low over the courtyard, menacing in black and red, its twin searchlights glaring down at them. “The ship is here,” Amélie ordered the others. “Extract her immediately.”

     “Not so fast!”

     Lena’s voice rang out across the courtyard, and Angela’s head snapped up to see her silhouetted in the lobby of Lijiang tower. Reinhardt loomed up behind her, his massive frame filling the entryway. Further inside, Genji finished off two stray Talon soldiers with a sweep of his blades. And Ana stood right beside Reinhardt, her sniper rifle raised to her eye and trained on them.

_Ana._

     Amélie's reaction was instantaneous. Faster than Angela could blink, she had her rifle up as well, trained directly at Ana. The Talon agents ducked for cover, and Angela found her limp body thrust to the front of their group like a human shield.

     Pain-dazed as she was, Angela found it a strange tableau. Was it deja vu for Ana and Amélie? The two snipers – the two finest shooters in the world – faced each other across the Lijiang courtyard, crosshairs locked.

     “You!” Amélie snarled.

     “You,” Ana said, and her voice was sad and resigned.

     Ana did not shoot. Amélie did.

     “No!” A hoarse scream broke through Angela’s throat as she saw the pale blue finger tighten on the trigger. Without thinking, she lunged forwards out of the grip of her captor soldiers, hurling herself on the Talon assassin. She caught Amélie's elbow with her shoulder and it was just enough to throw her aim off - just enough.

     The sniper bullet slammed into the wood of the doorframe a foot above Ana’s head. Amélie hissed in frustration, twisting like a cat out of Angela’s reach. She fired again before Angela even knew it and a second bullet hissed through the air, hurtling towards Ana’s skull. This time, Amélie's aim was true – but Reinhardt slammed down his shield and the bullet ricocheted harmlessly off the hard-light barrier, leaving a concentric circle of cracks where it had struck.

     Amélie continued to fire into Reinhardt’s shield as the Talon agents pulled Angela back upright and dragged her up the waiting ramp of the dropship.

_Ana._

     Reinhardt was charging, Tracer and Genji were shouting her name, but they were all too late. Angela was already on board the enemy ship, and her friends could do nothing. She had eyes only for Ana. The old Overwatch sniper advanced behind Reinhardt, her aim locked – not on Amélie, but on Angela. She could almost feel Ana’s crosshairs locked onto her bloodied face, feel her old friend’s steady hands quivering under the weight of the choice she was about to make.

_Ana._

     The ship’s engines roared, and they began to lift away. Through the haze of the battlefield, their eyes met, blue to brown.

 _Take the shot,_ she begged of her old friend through a haze of fire and pain, as they rocketed upwards and the door of the dropship closed inch by inch. _They won’t kill me. They need me. You know what they’ll do to me if they capture me alive. Don’t let them torture me. Don’t let them turn me into her. Make it quick. Take the shot._

_Please. It would be mercy._

     She closed her eyes and braced herself for a bullet that never came.

     I should have realized, Angela thought later, as the hovercraft soared away into the midnight sky over Lijiang. No matter the circumstances, Ana Amari could never shoot a friend in cold blood. Not even if Amélie had been brainwashed into a mindless killing machine. And not even if Angela was about to be.

 

*****

 

**Somewhere in Chinese airspace. Present day.**

     Even as she sat in the Talon dropship, bound hand and foot in hard light restraints, the Valkyrie suit was doing its work. Her Caduceus staff had been reduced to scrap, and lay in pieces at the feet of one of the soldiers. Yet Angela felt her internal nanites pulsing through her body, knitting her fractured ribs, soothing her burned skin, easing the concussion that she must surely have sustained when the grenade sent her into the wall. Still, it was a long time before Angela’s lungs and throat healed enough for her to speak without coughing up her own blood. It was another long time before she figured out what there was to be said.

     “Amélie. Amélie LaCroix.”

     The Talon assassin sat in the berth opposite her, coolly dismantling and cleaning her rifle. The red lights in the cabin gleamed off of her skintight catsuit. She gave no sign that she had heard.

     “So, is this what it has come to?” Angela croaked hoarsely. “ You’re working for them now? _Mein gott_ , Amélie -”

     “That is not my name,” said the other very quietly, without looking up. “Not anymore.”

     Angela stared hard at her, trying to find some semblance of the woman she once knew. “So, you’re Talon’s agent now. _Widowmaker_ , was that what they called you? You kill for them. Would you really kill us?”

     “Yes,” Amélie hissed, her feline eyes betraying nothing. “In a heartbeat. Amari would be dead had you not interfered.”

     “Dead. Like those people - those _kids_ \- in the courtyard? Like Mondatta, and Gerard -”

     That was the wrong thing to say. One moment Amélie was sitting quietly on the other side of the dropship bay, and the next her face was an inch away from Angela’s. Angela felt a cruel fist clench around her throat, and she realized a fraction of a second too late that she had stumbled across a very painful subject.

     “Do not speak of him to me,” the assassin breathed, her voice soft but tinged with fury. “You know nothing. Nothing at all.”

     It was the first time Angela had seen her lose her cool. The other Talon agents in the dropship stirred, unnerved, as Amélie's grip tightened and Angela began to splutter. But Angela tenaciously refused to break eye contact, holding Amélie's murderous gaze even as her lungs burned and her vision flickered.

     “Easy there, Widowmaker,” the nearest soldier finally muttured. “Our orders were to take her alive.”

     A beat. Then, suddenly, Amélie released Angela, turning contemptuously and striding back towards her seat as Angela gasped for breath. There was something predatory, something inhuman and _arachnoid_ in her graceful, clipped movements. The wrongness of it set every instinct, every nerve in Angela’s body on edge.

     “What happened to you?” Angela whispered at her retreating form.

     Amélie was silent for so long that Angela began to think that she was not going to reply. Then, very softly, she murmured:

     “I think that you are going to find out.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My first Overwatch fanfiction, and my first writing on AO3! Cover art is my original work.
> 
> Find me on [DA](https://www.deviantart.com/kittify) and [Tumblr](http://seraphfic.tumblr.com/)!


	2. Angela (Blood and Ocean)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: suicide

_“Take two, and call me in the morning.”_

 

**Somewhere in Chinese airspace. Present day.**

     There was a suicide pill tucked into a secret compartment in the collar of her Valkyrie suit. A pretty blue thing, wrapped in polymer, positioned just so that she could reach it even if her hands were bound. In case the mission failed. In case everything went wrong. In case she was alone, disarmed, with no way out and nowhere left to turn.

_What happened to you?_

_I think that you are going to find out._

     Amélie's words echoed in her mind, confirming Angela’s worst suspicions. So this was what Talon wanted with her. To violate her mind and warp her body with perverse science. To transform her into a callous assassin, just like this shell of a woman in front of her. To wield her as a weapon against everything and everyone she had ever loved.

     Now, Angela thought about the suicide pill in her collar. She thought about it quite a lot, as the engines of the Talon dropship hummed and they sped further and further away from Lijiang. She could not take the pill right here, not with a dozen agents sitting beside her in the dropship and watching her every move. They would stop her in a heartbeat, and then her only chance would be gone. She have to wait, and time her moment well.

 _Am I brave enough to choose death?_  

     She remembered the last moments of the battle at Lijiang Tower, Ana’s desperate face gazing up at her through the scope of her sniper rifle as the dropship doors closed and stole Angela into the sky. She had silently begged for Ana to shoot her - a mercy kill. An act of kindness, to spare her a fate worse than death.

     But Ana had stayed her hand.

     What choice did she have, now? Angela did not dare entertain hopes of rescue. When Amélie had been taken, Gerard and the rest of Overwatch had moved heaven and earth to try and find her. They had failed, despite it all. Today, the recalled Overwatch was operating on a mere fraction of the resources they once wielded. And they still knew next to nothing about Talon, its bases, its operations. Ana, Winston, Athena and all the others - they would search for her all across the world. But she knew they would not find her. 

     This was war, and she was prisoner to a ruthless terrorist organization. There was one choice. Ever since the doors of the Talon dropship slammed shut behind her, there had only ever been one choice. Angela Ziegler would do her duty.

 _Oh, Ana,_ she thought mournfully. _At least you won’t have my blood on your hands._

     Time passed. The dropship engines roared as they hurtled through the night. The cabin vibrated and the mangled metal of what was once her Caduceus staff jangled where it lay, discarded beneath the soldiers’ feet. Angela waited quietly, sitting with her limbs bound and her head bowed. Her matted platinum hair fell over her face, and she looked for all the world as if she had slipped into unconsciousness. But in truth, her every sense was on alert, and she carefully watched the Talon agents around her from behind lowered eyelids. She tugged subtly at the hard-light restraints on her arms and legs, searching for any sign of weakness. There was none. 

     She was not sure how long it had been when the drone of the engines changed. They were descending at last. Wherever they were, wherever they were taking her, they had arrived.

     The dropship doors opened with a mechanical clang and hiss, revealing a black tarmac lit up with searchlights. Angela squinted into the night, trying to make out more of what she could only presume was Talon’s headquarters. A blast of frigid air rushed into the dropship, and there was snow piled at the edges of the landing strip. The air itself seemed thinner here. Angela began to shiver violently, her breath billowing out in front of her in a silver cloud. Were they in the mountains?

     On the tarmac below, a single man stood waiting, clad in a long, billowing coat. Angela stared hard at the figure, but could not make out his face in the shadows. With a sudden sinking realization, Angela realized that they had not blindfolded her before bringing her to their base. It didn’t matter what she saw, because they had no intention of letting her go.

     Amélie stood and holstered her long rifle over her shoulder, gesturing to the soldiers to follow her. One of the men picked up the twisted scraps of her Caduceus staff, bringing them off the ship with him. As the ramp of the dropship touched down, Amélie acknowledged the man with a perfunctory nod. “Korpal. Operation Azazel was successful. It was just as you said. We have her.”

     “Well done, Widowmaker.”

 _Korpal_. That name, that toneless voice. It all felt vaguely familiar, but Angela did not dwell on it. It did not matter, not now. Not anymore.

     With Amélie and the soldier’s attention momentarily diverted from her onto the strange new arrival, she suddenly saw her chance. No one was watching her. Dipping her chin, she worked her tongue and jaw and quickly plucked the little blue pill out from the secret compartment in the neck of her Valkyrie suit. 

     Holding it in her mouth, Angela hesitated for a moment. But only a moment, before making her choice. 

 _It will be quick_ , she told herself _._ She had helped to design the poison herself. The toxin was one of the most potent that science could provide. The dosaged contained in one little blue capsule could kill a dozen men. It would overwhelm the healing capacities of her valkyrie suit at once. First would come nerve damage, coagulopathy, cardiac arrest. Her heart would stop beating, her brain would cease to function. She would be dead in moments. 

     Bite. Chew. The taste was bitter as regret.

 _Please, God, let it be painless. Let it be easy._  

     She swallowed, and closed her eyes. 

          and then -

_convulsion, back arched_

_breathless_

_Amélie's snarl, the soldiers’ shouting, many hands holding her down to the floor of the dropship_

_they forced her jaw open_

_blood streaming from her mouth and eyes_

_they could not have her_

_in death_

_I’m sorry,_ Angela thought. For what, she could not say. For... everything. She gasped a last gasp, and the world fell away. 

 

*****

 

**Watchpoint Gibraltar. Eight years ago.**

     The geneticist stood in front of Angela with her arms crossed, a collection of sharp angles and and prim lines. With her mismatched eyes and knife-twist of a mouth, she was the kind of woman who was strange, who knew she was strange and who wore her strangeness like armor. She was icy, unnatural, beautiful in a wintry sort of way. And yet from under her harsh gaze, you couldn’t help but wonder what the world had done to her to make her so cold.

     She also happened to be the very last person who Angela wanted to see.

     “Dr. O’Deorain,” said Angela, barely bothering to conceal the rancor in her tone. “What are you on about?”

     “Dr. Ziegler. You know exactly what I’m on about,” Moira O’Deorain growled.

     From behind her desk, Angela lowered her head into hands that reeked of antiseptic and blood and more antiseptic. She pressed her palms hard against her eyes, watching crimson storm clouds blossom into life behind her eyelids. It had been a bloody day. A bloody year, with no end in sight.

     She ached with an ache that went deeper than her bones. The kind of ache that crept over her body at night and coiled around her chest until she could not breathe. Some wounds no amount of nanobiotic regeneration could heal.

     “I’m really not in the mood to chat, O’Deorain,” Angela snapped, breaking a silence that had stretched on for too long. “It’s getting late, and I’ll have to ask you to leave my office. Now.”

     “I will not.” Moira’s tone was even, controlled, and yet Angela could tell that she was furious.

     Even without looking up, Angela could sense that she had not moved an inch. She could picture Moira perfectly from memory; her well-tailored black shirt buttoned to the neck, her thin lips and chiseled cheekbones. One time in the lab, her thoughts wandering in the early hours of morning, Angela had found herself staring at Moira and thinking distractedly that she might have been sculpted by a sculptor who had been trying a little bit too hard for perfection.

     Angela let her hands fall from her face and looked up at Moira through bleary, resigned eyes. “Then, please, tell me what the hell it is that you want with me, so that we can both get on with our lives.”

     Moira lifted a single eyebrow, and there was an accusation in her movements. “I think you know very well why I’m here, Angela, but I’ll humor you all the same. There are certain _sensitive_ reagents missing from my laboratory. Stolen without a trace, over the last week.”

     “How mysterious.” 

     “I want them back. And I think you took them.”

     Their eyes met, blue and blue to blue and red. They glared at each other, each waiting for the other to be the first to blink. They were equals in every sense; in academia, in brilliance, and in stubbornness.

     “Really?” Angela finally spoke up, carefully keeping her tone light and unconcerned. “What an interesting hypothesis.”

     “Goddamnit!” Moira slammed a hand down on Angela’s desk, sending papers flying around the office. “Don’t mock me. You take me a for a fool, Dr. Ziegler, but I’ll be damned if I let this continue. Do you think I don’t know what those ingredients are for? 25 mL Benzodiazepine? 1L hydrogen cyanide? 20mL Phenobarbital? _You’re plotting a murder, aren’t you?_ ”

     In disbelief, Angela let out a bitter, incredulous laugh. “Is that what you really think?”

     “I know you’re the one who took my euthanasia reagents. I have no idea what your motives could possibly be, but you’re the only one with means and opportunity to do it. You mean to poison someone, and I won’t have it on my conscience.”

     Despite everything, the way she said it made Angela snort. “What conscience?” 

     “Fuck you. You’re the only one with keycard access to all the laboratories and biohazard zones. You know where the cameras are, and you could avoid them easily after hours, when everyone had gone. I know it was you, Ziegler! I could report you for this.” 

     It was not funny anymore. It was anything but funny. Yet, hearing it all, Angela’s laughter only grew into an uncontrollable paroxysm of mirth.

     “I don’t know what you’re planning to do with those drugs,” Moira continued, pacing up and down the length of the office. “But I won’t have it. Give it up, Ziegler, I want to know the truth. Who’s the bastard you’re trying to do in? Why are you trying to murder someone on the base? Are you a trait -”

     “- Ziegler, what is wrong with you?” 

     She had slumped out of her chair and sunk to her knees behind her desk, laughing hysterically. The laughter poured from her chest and clawed its way out of her throat like vomit. Angela clutched her head and pressed a fist to her mouth, but she still could not stop laughing. She bit down and drew blood from her knuckles. The wrongness of her own voice grated on her ears, and yet she could not stop -

_she could not breathe -_

_she would surely go mad -_

     A _slap_.

     A hard slap across the right side of her face, knocking all her thoughts askew. Angela gasped in pain, reeling backwards, and the shock of it all was enough to stun her into silence. Then she felt a hand seizing her shoulder and pinning her to the ground. Sharp-nailed fingers seized her chin up, tilting it up, and there were Moira’s mismatched eyes staring wildly into her own.

_blue as ocean - red as blood - she had blood on her hands - and oceans could not wash her clean_

     “Dammit, Ziegler! What are you playing at? Either you’re going to kill someone, or -” 

     Suddenly and for the first time since they had met, Moira shut up. A thunderous silence fell between the two of them where they were poised on the floor of the office. Angela could only draw her knees in and hiccup raggedly as she saw the truth finally across the geneticist’s face. 

     “Suicidal ideation, Angela?” Moira’s voice came as soft as a whisper.

     “I. Don’t know. What you’re talking about,” Angela said, in a voice that was not her own.

     Silence fell again, the kind of silence that results when no one quite knows what to say or do. Angela sat very still, concentrating on her breathing, feeling empty beyond words. 

     “I’m... sorry.” The words sounded foreign in Moira’s mouth. “I’m sorry for hitting you. That was wrong, and I shouldn’t have done it.”

 _Nine breaths. Ten breaths._ Angela only nodded mutely.

     Moira finally released her grip on Angela’s shoulders. She seized the edge of Angela’s desk and raised herself up to sit in the office chair. “When was the last time you slept?” she asked quietly.

 _Thirty breaths. Thirty-one._ Some nights Angela dreamed that she was alone, searching for her mother in the rubble of Geneva. She dreamed of shrapnel and bomb blasts and a woman’s screaming in the distance that went on and on, growing nearer and nearer, louder and louder. Then she would wake, and find that the screams had been her own all along.

 _Forty-nine. Fifty._ She did not sleep very much at all these days.

     “Just last night,” said Angela out loud. It was the most transparent of lies.

     She did not want to remember her dreams, for that train of thought led to dark places. To distract herself, she concentrated on Moira in her rolling chair. It was far too short for her gangly legs, and the prim geneticist looked ridiculous. _Like an awkward cricket._ The thought was sudden and wayward, but it was something to focus on. 

     “Last night? You’ll pardon me if I don’t believe that,” Moira remarked, casting an eye over Angela’s bloodshot eyes and the dark circles that threatened to eclipse them altogether. “You’ll also pardon me if I don’t feel quite right leaving you alone tonight.” 

     That was fair. It was what Angela would have done herself. It was also more than she had expected from Moira.

     The other doctor carded her fingers through her fiery hair. “I want my euthanasia drugs back first thing tomorrow, Angela. I mean it. But tonight, let me buy you a drink. You look like you could really use one.”

     Angela looked at her in surprise. “You’re not serious.”

     “I am.” Moira stood, and offered Angela her left hand. Angela took it gingerly. The geneticist’s fingers were ice-cold and her grip steely, yet her touch was very much human, very much alive. Angela could not bring herself to let go even once she was back on her feet. Tonight, more than ever, she needed something to hold onto.

     “Why do you care?”

     The question burst from her unbidden. She looked deep into Moira’s blood-and-ocean eyes, looked for something like salvation. Instead, she saw something stark and unfathomable looking back.

     “Because the world needs you alive, Angela.”

     And there was much left unsaid between them.

 

*****

 

**Talon headquarters, Karakoram mountains. Present day.**

     Deep in the night, deep amongst the dark, snowy peaks, a strange tableau unfolded. An assassin, a dozen soldiers, and a mysterious man stood ringed around the broken body of a woman who was once the finest doctor in all the world. Angela Ziegler’s empty blue eyes were turned towards the starry heavens, a beatific expression frozen on her face. The blood trickling from her lips was still warm, and the silver clouds of breath issuing from her lungs had ceased not moments before.

     And yet there she lay, a beautiful corpse.

     Behind them, a hidden gate in the mountainside opened with a pneumatic hiss, and a gigantic, dark-skinned man strode out into the mountain night. Even at a distance, the new arrival dwarfed them all. His muscular form was muffled in a long coat that was cut off at the right shoulder, and the glow of the searchlights on the tarmac threw his craggy, scarred face into sharp relief. The chrome plating of a mechanical hand gleamed in the gathering twilight.

     “This is a debacle, Korpal,” glowered Akande Ogundimu, his face stormy, his voice as deep as the rumble of a distant avalanche. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

     Sanjay Korpal calmly dropped to his knees over Angela and put his finger on her neck, seeking her pulse. Her skin was not yet cold, but he found not even the faintest flutter of life. Slowly, he nodded his head.

     “Yes. She is. By her own hand.” 

     “Bloody fools!” Akande swore, slamming one enormous fist into the palm of the other with skull-crushing force. “You, you, all of you” - he pointed his gauntlet at Amélie and each of the soldiers in turn - “have failed us. Your mission was simple. Go to Lijiang, and bring Mercy to us alive. What use to us is her dead body?” 

     The Talon operatives cowered beneath his fury - all but Amélie, who said nothing but returned his gaze impassively.

     “She is dead, yes,” Sanjay mused quietly, straightening from where he crouched over the corpse. “But she may not yet be beyond our reach. Death can be a fickle thing.”

     "What exactly do you mean by that?” Akande demanded, wheeling around. 

     By way of reply, the architech stalked up to one of the Talon men and seized a few pieces of scrap metal out of his hands. He turned around, holding up the mangled remains of the Caduceus staff. “All of you, come over here and help to bring her inside!” he snapped to the soldiers. “We must place her in stasis at once! There is not a moment to be lost." 

     They hastened to obey. Many hands hoisted Angela aloft, and the soldiers began to carry her limp body through the entry gate into the headquarters.

     “And another thing.” Sanjay turned to his compatriot, weighing the Caduceus staff in his hands. It was shattered, broken perhaps beyond repair. It had the feeling of a dead thing. “I want to send a message to Oasis. A summons.” 

     “Oasis?” Akande’s brow furrowed.

     “Yes. You heard me.”

     The two Talon high councillors faced each other on the steep, lonely mountainside strip, silhouetted against the darkness by the glaring searchlights. Amélie stood a little ways behind them, silent as a ghost. _Oasis_. They all knew what – or more accurately, who - that meant.

     Akande shook his head slowly, doubtfully. “You know that she won’t leave her precious laboratory without a fight. What is your plan, Korpal?”

     Sanjay smiled a smile colder than the mountain night.

     “She will come. And she will resurrect Angela Ziegler.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Moira POV chapter coming next!
> 
> I have this vague idea to draw art to accompany each chapter. Don't know if I have it in me to do it every time, though. Sporadic art, maybe? Check back to see how that goes.
> 
> Find me on [DA](https://www.deviantart.com/kittify) and [Tumblr](http://seraphfic.tumblr.com/)!


	3. Moira (The First Time)

_"An unwelcome interruption."_

 

**Oasis Tower, Oasis, Iraq. Present day.**

     All was not well in the city of Oasis.

     In the distant Arabian desert, a great sandstorm roared towards the city, transforming the pale dawn sky to a bloody crimson haze. The shifting sands hissed and raged, rising high and swallowing the horizon in an ominous shroud of darkness that crept ever closer.

     A single woman stood on the highest balcony of the Tower of Oasis, silhouetted against the gathering storm with her headscarf and skirt whipping in the blistering wind. Slowly, forcefully, the woman raised her right hand skywards. On cue, a hard-light wall began to rise from all around the edges of the city. The tessellated honeycomb barrier ascended higher and higher into the sky, carving out a perfect dome that arched into the sky over the city.

     High overhead, the storm arrived and slammed futilely against the blue dome, its howling wind and hissing sands reduced to the softest of hums. Below, the city began to stir, its morning rhythms uninterrupted. University students hurried about in the Abu Hassoun gardens, and residents strolled through the shops and cafes of the commercial district. Beyond, in the city center, the blaring, honking madness of traffic went on as usual. The people of Oasis spared a glance upwards at the danger they had narrowly been spared, and then carried on with their lives without a second thought – safe under the aegis of the greatest minds in the world.

     And then all was well in the city of Oasis.

     On the lofty balcony, Anya Al-Shahrani, Minister of Geology, founder of Oasis, lowered her hand and brushed back the wisps of curly hair that had fallen loose from her hijab. Behind her, another woman - fiery-haired, alabaster-skinned, distinctly foreign - stood leaning against the door to the balcony. Clad in a well-tailored black suit, she draped her long frame over the railing with dangerous feline grace.

     “Very impressive,” said Moira O’Deorain, flashing a crooked smile and clapping her hands appreciatively.

     “You’ve never seen me do that, have you?” Anya turned, smiling, to her fellow minister. “I thought you might like it. The triumph of science over nature.”

     She was very lovely, Moira observed, with her quick brown eyes and lustrous hair that was always spilling from her headscarf. It wasn’t sentiment, it was objective fact. Anya was in her forties or fifties, but she looked much younger. They both did – aging like mortals was a thing of the past in Oasis.

     The celebrated Iraqi scientist, ever so regal and poised in public, looped a finger around Moira’s belt and pulled her in with a coy smile. Obligingly, Moira leaned down and let Anya draw her into a kiss.

     Cruelly, she felt nothing but cool indifference. Nothing, compared to –

     Moira cut that thought off abruptly.

 _This is not love_ , she admonished herself. Ever the realist, she entertained no illusions to the fact. This was stolen kisses, a hand tucked in hers at Oasis’s formal events, a taste of freedom and flirtation and danger. This was play, no more. Anya was a brilliant thinker, an idealistic leader, a peerless scientist. A beautiful woman with a beautiful mind – oh, she was Moira’s type. And she seemed to like Moira very much indeed. But altogether, Anya reminded her too much of –

         - _Some nights in the dark she thought of summer in Gibraltar, golden hair and ocean eyes. Some nights she imagined it was her, had to choke back her name in the black of midnight –_

 _I should be content_ , Moira thought from where she stood high in the Tower of Oasis, overlooking the shining metropolis that she had come to call her home _. It has been years. Here I am in Oasis, on the far side of the world. I have a city to rule, a beautiful woman on my arm, and all the support for my work that I could ever desire._

_I should be happy, and yet I remain perfectly determined to make myself unhappy._

     Her personal holopad hummed. Moira broke away gently, pulling it out of her pocket to glance at it.   

>           7:49am. Incoming call from S. Korpal

     A pit of dread coalesced in her stomach. _The hell does he want?_

     “Korpal? Is that the head of Vishkar Corporation?” Anya asked, following her gaze and glimpsing the glowing name stamp. “How unexpected.”

     Moira quickly pressed “Ignore” and pocketed the holopad. “I’m sure it is nothing.” she lied smoothly, carefully keeping her voice indifferent and unconcerned. Beneath a creased brow, her colorful eyes betrayed little. “Vishkar has been looking to gain a foothold in Oasis for a long time now. Another trivial sales pitch, I am sure.”

     Lying was so easy for her these days.

     Anya nodded, satisfied. She smiled as Moira placed a long finger under her chin and drew her in to press a cold kiss to her brow. Again, Moira noted her own reactions – nothing at all.

     In Moira’s chest pocket, the holopad hummed insistently.

     Sanjay Korpal, representative of Vishkar, high councilor of Talon. Moira O’Deorain, Minister of Genetics, his colleague and co-conspirator. Brilliant as Anya was, there was much that she did not know - and she was probably better off for it. She was a scientist at heart, and had all the idealism and naiveté that tended to come with the breed. How was she to suspect that her scientific collaborator and occasional lover also stood at the head of one of the deadliest terrorist organizations in the world?

     The holopad briefly fell silent, then began to vibrate again. Moira closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, letting out a faint sigh. Her feeling of foreboding intensified, slowly turning her blood to ice. This was not good. It was never good. _Goddamn you, Korpal._

     “A persistent man,” said Anya, looking amused as she adjusted her hijab and robes. “I really must be going, I have a laboratory meeting at nine. But maybe you should pick up. See what he wants.”

     “Maybe,” Moira murmured automatically, her mind elsewhere. “I’ll see you later, my dear.”

     Above, the hard-light dome shimmered softly in a strange, artificial facsimile of the blue morning sky. The holopad again fell silent, then pinged with a new text message. Moira anxiously thumbed the device in her pocket, diligently waiting until Anya had left the balcony and was firmly out of sight before taking it back out. The message promptly popped up, projected into the air above the holopad at Moira’s eye level. 

>           7:51am. Korpal: Do I have your attention now?

     But it wasn’t the message that caught Moira’s eye. Instead, it was the photo attachment, hovering in midair beneath the words. A close-up of a woman’s face, a lovely face that was dreadfully, terribly familiar -

                  _It was Angela Ziegler._

_liquid eyes turned towards her, silent, frozen_

_snowflakes in blonde hair matted crimson with dried blood_

_lips, skin bitter and blue_

_beautiful_

_a dead thing_

     Moira hurled her holopad off the balcony. It fell, down, down, several hundred feet to the street below, where it shattered into a thousand shards of metal and dust.

 

*****

 

**Somewhere near Watchpoint Gibraltar. Eight years ago.**

     The Mediterranean twilight was mild, heady, filled with the light of a full moon and the fresh scent of earth after rain. In the distance the ocean glistened gunmetal-grey, the Rock of Gibraltar rising from its flat silvery expanse like a shadow shrouded in cloud.

     It was a fine night, but the little bar they went to was nearly empty. It was a Tuesday weeknight, and Gibraltar was filled with Overwatch personnel too preoccupied with the business of keeping the world safe to be hungover on a Wednesday morning. Moira and Angela were the only two people sitting at the bar – something that Moira had anticipated. Watchpoint Gibraltar was not that big of a base, and everyone knew each other. And sometimes you just needed to drink, without prying eyes and the pressure of dealing with people. Moira understood that well enough.

     True to her word, Moira bought Angela a drink. Angela had no idea what to order, so Moira got them both a whiskey neat. She hid a wry grin of amusement when Angela took a tiny sip of the drink instead of knocking it back, and made a face of disgust.

     “You don’t drink very often, do you?”

     “No.”

     Angela was half-hidden in shadow at the dingy bar, a crumpled lab coat draped over protruding shoulder blades. Her blue jeans were ripped at the knee, and strands of tangled golden hair spilled from her messy ponytail over her face. She sat over her whiskey, her knees tucked in and her narrow frame hunched into herself. She resembled a classical statue. A fallen angel in an act of modern-day martyrdom.

 _She was beautiful._ Unbidden, unwelcome, the dangerous thought coiled its dark tentacles around Moira’s mind.

     They sat in a silence that quickly grew thick and impenetrable. Angela, normally gregarious and quick to flash a smile, remained quiet with her blue eyes fixed on her still-full glass. She had the look of someone whose thoughts were heavy and far away. Someone who had a lot on her mind. For her part, Moira, usually apathetic to idle chatter, was ill-equipped to make conversation. She focused on her drink instead, finishing it in a few quick gulps.

_I should say something._

     But they had left much unsaid. And what was there to say to Angela, after that spectacle of a confrontation back in the office? Angela, who, by all accounts, hated her and all that she stood for? Angela, who was fighting demons that Moira could hardly fathom? Angela, sitting inches from her on the next stool. Even in the half-light, Moira could see that her left cheek still bore a red mark, though it was fading fast – it was a superficial injury, and her internal nanites were making short work of it. She was so close, and yet oceans away.

     Moira didn’t know what to say, so she just drank.

     They sat side by side at the bar, staring at their glasses, neither speaking. The inertia of the silence grew the longer it stretched on. _Twenty minutes._ Moira finished two whiskeys and nursed a third. Angela was still on her first.

_Say something._

     Moira had nursed a concern in the back of her mind that Angela would get too drunk, which seemed like a problematic proposition. She looked miserable, and Moira knew from a certain degree of experience that an excess of alcohol tended to only compound one’s personal misery. But that didn’t seem likely at all. It had been nearly a half hour, and Angela had only taken two sips of her drink.

     If anything, Moira was the one in danger of getting drunk.

 _Thirty minutes._ The bartender shot them sideways looks from across the bar, unnerved by the strangeness of the mood surrounding his two patrons.

_Say something!_

     “You’re beautiful,” Moira said at all once.

     It was all wrong. It was sudden, whiskey-stained, the wrong thing to say. It would have been something lovely and achingly soft from any other lips. But Moira dropped the words like a blunt statement of fact, as if they were in the lab and she was trying to point out something that should have been insultingly obvious. She could have said “You’re blonde,” or “That’s a pull door,” in the same tone of voice.

     Cold fear twisted around Moira’s heart, but Angela turned to face her with the bemused look of someone who had been broken out of a reverie.

     “Sorry, what? Did you say something?”

     “It was nothing.”

     The stifling silence again settled over them like a cloak, and Moira dared to let out a breath that she didn’t realize she had been holding. She felt a sense of relief, of vertigo. As if she had narrowly dodged a car accident. As if she had nearly wandered off the edge of an abyss, but been plucked back at the last second before gravity could take hold and pull her relentlessly down.

     Then, suddenly, Angela put her unfinished drink back onto the bar with a loud _clink_. She stood, with an air of a woman who had made up her mind about something. “Let’s go. I could use some air.”

     Moira made to stand as well. The world swayed ever so slightly around her, and she belatedly realized that she was tipsier than she had bargained for. She could usually handle her alcohol, but she had misjudged what three drinks would be like on an empty stomach and perhaps four hours of sleep in the last forty-eight. Her mind, usually so rational, so organized, had become blank and restless.

     Angela took by the hand, steadying her and leading her out the door. Moira chose to focus on her grip. Her palm was callused, her touch warm.

     “What are we doing?”

     “Getting some air.”

     It was late evening, and the sun had set over the horizon. Shadows pooled in the empty street outside, and the Mediterranean night was falling in earnest. They were far from the base here, in a sleepy old town that overlooked the strait. The only sounds were the wind in the grass, the chirping of cicadas, the lonely cries of seabirds wheeling and turning overhead.

     Moira’s car – a standard, spartan, Overwatch-issued model – was parked in the lot beside the bar, but Angela did not head that way. The side of the street facing the bar was deserted and undeveloped; a field of soft grass that rose into a low hill dotted with scrubs. Beyond it, Moira thought she could hear the ocean. Angela pulled her in that direction, her grip never loosening.

     “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Moira queried as they crossed the street and jumped a low fence to enter the grassy field. Moira’s pointed leather shoes sank deep into the soft grass – she was very much unprepared for hiking. And the alcohol wasn’t helping her balance.

     Angela’s hand tightened on hers. “Just walk with me.”

     Together, hand in hand, they crossed the grassy field and began to pick their way up the side of the hill. A warm sea breeze picked up, playing with their hair, setting Angela’s ponytail aflutter behind her. Angela led the way and Moira trailed behind her, being pulled along by her hand. Brambles caught at Moira’s pants and plucked at the hem of her coat.

     “Angela, do you know where we’re going?”

     Angela Ziegler looked back, and Moira saw her smile wanly for the first time that night. “No. I haven’t the faintest idea. Let’s find out.”

     On she went, and Moira could only follow her into the shadows.

     After several minutes of walking, they reached the crest of the hill. Here, the world smelled of salt and freshly turned earth. The view was incredible. This side of the hill led down to the sea, lapping gently against the pebbled shore a short way beneath them. Moira looked behind them – the street and the bar were long out of view, hidden in the bushes behind them. They were alone, with only the empty sky and the warm Mediterranean Sea for company. The flat expanse of the ocean glistened obsidian-black in the night. The moon was high, and the first stars were beginning to shimmer into sight overhead.  

     “Here,” said Angela, stopping at last. “We’re going here.” 

     She let go of Moira’s hand, and sat down on the soft grass of the hill. After a moment’s hesitation, Moira sat beside her, folding her long legs carefully away.

     They gazed out over the ocean for a minute, each lost in their own thoughts. It was a lovely vista, but Moira had never been one to appreciate the scenery. Instead, she watched the woman next to her out of the corner of her eye. Angela’s face was half-hidden in shadow. A few stray strands of blonde hair danced around her face in the warm summer breeze.

     “Why did you bring me out here?” Moira asked.

     “Isn’t it beautiful?” murmured Angela.

     “Yes, it is.”

     Angela was quiet for a moment, and Moira sensed that she was gathering her thoughts. The darkness of night settled over the hill, warm and thick and welcome. Around them, fireflies blinked in and out of sight.

     “Sometimes, I need places like this,” Angela began, her voice soft and uncertain. “I’ve seen a lot in my life, Moira. I’ve served on more battlefields than I can even remember. I’ve seen things that you would not believe. Machines killing people. People killing people. There is so much pain in my past, and I carry that with me. Always. I’ve carried it for so long that it’s a part of me. And sometimes, I just need a reminder that not everything is senseless and cruel. Not everything is broken.

     “Sometimes, I just need to be reminded that there are still beautiful places out there. Places by the ocean, where there are wildflowers, where it’s quiet and still. Places like this. They remind me that there is so much beauty in this world. And maybe, just maybe, this world is still worth fighting for."

     She laughed to herself, her fingers fidgeting anxiously in her lap. “I’m sorry. You of all people must think it uselessly sentimental of me.”

     “No. I understand,” Moira said. And she did. 

     Angela took Moira’s left hand in her own, squeezing it lightly between her own. “25 mL Benzodiazepine, 1L hydrogen cyanide, 20mL Phenobarbital,” she recited. “Maybe I was going to kill myself. Maybe I wasn’t. I don’t know. I really don’t know anymore. But I’m sorry for stealing your drugs."

     Her wide, lake-blue eyes welled with unshed tears. The faintest pink mark tinged her right cheek, where Moira had struck her a lifetime ago. Seeing it, Moira was suddenly overwhelmed with guilt and contrition. “I’m sorry for hitting you. I never meant to hurt you.”

     “It’s okay. I’ll live.”

     Moira looked at her. “Is that a promise?”                 

     Angela laughed and glanced away, a single tear carving a gleaming trail down her face. On impulse, Moira reached towards her and wiped the teardrop away with her thumb.

     “Please, don’t cry,” she murmured. 

     Her fingers lingered softly on the mark she had left on Angela’s cheek, then moved on to brush a few stray strands of hair from her face. Their eyes met, blue and blue, blue and red. 

     When they kissed, it was tasted bittersweet, like whiskey, like things unsaid. All at once Angela’s lips were on hers and it was gentle and delicate and it took Moira’s breath away. Their first kiss was a perfectly ruinous thing, filled with unspoken wanting, and the sea rose and the world tipped and Moira knew at once that she would never be the same for this. It was the kind of kiss that was so good that it hurt, and it would hurt for the rest of Moira’s life. No other woman would ever compare -

     “Don’t stop,” Angela sighed and Moira didn’t. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to. She pressed her lips into Angela's neck, into the sharp line of her collarbone, into the corner of her mouth, all the while thinking that if Angela was broken then she would gladly cut herself to bleeding on her jagged edges. 

     They were both on their knees, bodies tangling together as they drowned in each other. Without breaking the kiss, Angela grasped her shoulders and pushed her down to the ground. Moira found herself on her back on the soft green grass, Angela straddling her and pinning her down by her wrists. They broke apart at last, both gasping for breath. Moira saw stars, glimmering above Angela in the moonlit sky.

     She was drunk on whiskey, drunk on the balmy Mediterranean night, drunk on the brilliant, damaged woman astride her. She was teetering on the brink of something vast and unfathomable, an abyss yawning before her.

     “You’re beautiful,” said Moira, again. 

     And Angela Ziegler smiled in earnest, twining her fingers into Moira’s hair and learning down to kiss her narrow jaw. Pulling Moira close, she whispered into her ear:

     “I heard you the first time.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"Moira didn’t know what to say, so she just drank."_
> 
> Same, Moira. Same.
> 
> Find me on [DA](https://www.deviantart.com/kittify) and [Tumblr](http://seraphfic.tumblr.com/)!
> 
>  
> 
> A very special thanks to [koshkavinni](http://koshkavinni.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for this wonderful fanart!


	4. Moira (Big Sister Is Watching You)

_“What time we had is fading.”_

****

**City Center, Oasis, Iraq. Present Day.**

     She was not afraid of death. She died each time she faded away. And each time, death could not hold her. Each time, she was reborn. 

     Atoms became molecules, molecules became proteins, polymers, nucleic acids. Individual carbons tessellated into long organic chains. Adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine wound together into strands of DNA, rewriting the simple genetic code that underpinned all that she was. Actin and myosin stitched together into slender muscles, which wrapped around the narrow bones of her skeleton. Nerves – always last, so she would feel no pain - coiled through her body, twining together within her skull to remake her gifted brain.

     And where once there was only a curl of black mist, there stood a woman of flesh and blood.

     She materialized in the middle of the city, at the very center of the morning rush. Children screamed. Men and women flinched back, cursing. The enormous crowd parted like water, as the citizenry of Oasis stampeded as one to flee the ghost that walked among them. A car swerved off the road and careened into the palm trees lining the street. Tires screeched, horns blared, and the shrilling of a store’s alarm filled the morning air. A scene of utter confusion unfolded across the square.

     Moira O’Deorain was blind the chaos that she had caused. Before her austere black suit had even fully reformed from smoke, she was stalking across the city center at a near sprint. Her first thought was of Angela.

     In the distance, the clocks struck eight.

_Angela, dead -_

     She was running, running. She was running out of time.

 

*****

  

> _Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Olympia Shaw with Atlas Television Network, bringing you the day’s breaking news._
> 
> _Our first story: A massive terrorist attack in Chongqing, China. Late last night, a deadly paramilitary clash was reported between a large team of unknown assailants and several members of the recalled organization known as Overwatch. The latest reports state that at least thirty-two individuals are dead and up to two dozen were severely injured. The killing was indiscriminate; civilian causalities ranged in age from 12 to 75 years. Dozens of nations around the world have joined the Chinese government in condemning this incident. It is certainly one of the bloodiest attacks in recent memory._
> 
> _For more on this story, we turn to Atlas field reporter Li Xiaowei, live in Chongqing._
> 
> _Thank you, Olympia. I’m standing in front of Lijiang Tower right now. The building behind me has sustained severe damage during last night’s shootout. A catastrophic fire that ignited last night because of the gunfire has spread to neighboring buildings, resulting in increased death and injury. I have just received word that the current death toll stands at thirty-five. Tragically, several children are among the slain._
> 
> _The community is in shock, and as you can see, the sidewalk here is covered in flowers, candles, signs, and other tributes to the victims. The question that seems to be on everyone’s lips is – what happened last night? And why? The reasons for the conflict remain unclear, and Overwatch has yet to release any official statement. Although no terrorist group has yet claimed responsibility, eyewitness accounts have implicated the mysterious organization known as Talon. For the moment, much remains unknown._
> 
> _Back to you in the studio, Olympia._

*****

 

**University Laboratories, Oasis, Iraq. Present Day.**

     Deep in the bowels of the earth below the sunlit city, the world was sterile, dark, deathly cold. Here, the air itself was heavy, and the hallways reeked of ethanol and antiseptic. These laboratories were frequented only by the Minister of Genetics herself, and usually remained deserted and quiet as the grave. Today, however, was no usual day.

     The lights in Moira’s underground lab were already on. The security doors were ajar. The retina scan lock beeped tonelessly, displaying a crimson error message. Even before Moira slammed the doors open, she was certain of what – or rather, who - she would find there.

     She burst into the lab all at once, her hair wild, her suit askew, a lab coat haphazardly draped over her razor-thin shoulders.

     “Ah, there you are!” laughed a familiar voice. "I knew you’d come down to the labs eventually. Took you long enough, though. What, did you take the scenic route?"

     Lounging about in a rolling chair, Sombra was dressed in casual streetwear. It was a stark contrast from her usual unapologetically neon look. She was clad in blue jeans and ratty sneakers, which she had kicked up on Moira’s spotless workbench, dangerously close to a rack of bubbling yellow flasks. She balanced a holopad on her knees, and her distinctive multicolored hair was hidden underneath a nondescript black hoodie. The world’s most dangerous hacker looked for all the world like just another of the college students roaming the campus above.

     Still, Moira’s eyes lingered on the cybernetic grafts studding Sombra’s skull and hands, just visible beneath her hood and sleeves. Not Moira’s work. It was a functional but graceless augmentation, in her professional opinion. Most anyone could improve upon the human form, but most everyone lacked the imagination to  _improve humanity_. Moira could have done so much better with Sombra.  _Why wear a computer when you could_ be _a computer? I could transform her into an AI to rival Anubis._

     Tipping her chair back, Sombra plucked a small figurine off Moira’s desk and twirled it in her hands. “Is this Naruto? I like his hair." 

 _It’s Sasuke._  Moira didn’t bother correcting her. “How did you get in here, past all the security?”

     Sombra set the figurine down with a  _thunk_  that made Moira wince. “ _Dios!_ Security? Where? I hadn’t even noticed.”

     “Never mind,” Moira growled. “What are you doing here?”

     “Well, I figured that your lab is the only place within the walls of this dystopian surveillance-state city where there’s some semblance of privacy, and we can talk about… you know.” Sombra cupped her hand to her mouth and whispered, “ _Talon stuff_."

     “And what is there to talk about?”

     “Funny you should ask. I’m here because our mutual friend Sanjay asked me to be here. You’ve been ducking him for months now, so he wanted me to swing by for a little while, keep an eye on things, and  _make sure you got his message_. By the way, what the hell happened to your holopad? I was tracking you when it went offline all of a sudden. You managed to lose me for a minute, and I had to hack into the entire city’s camera network just to locate you again. Gave me quite the run-around.”

 _Sanjay’s message._   _Angela, dead -_

     “What did you do to Angela Ziegler?” Moira demanded.

     Sombra arched a razor-thin eyebrow. “Me, personally? I didn’t do anything. Why do you care so much?”

 _Insufferable girl._ Her tone was playful, yet needling, and Moira knew that Sombra was trying to provoke a response from her. It was what she did - get under peoples’ skin in hopes of forcing them to reveal more information. She could be like a bloodhound on the scent of a secret. “Angela is – was – a friend,” Moira murmured guardedly.

     “Aww, and I thought Naruto here was your only friend." 

_It’s Sasuke._

     Moira took a deep breath, pressing her fingers into her temples. Then, very slowly and deliberately, she paced over to a rack on her laboratory bench and withdrew an enormous long-needled syringe filled with violet fluid. “You would be wise not to forget who you are dealing with, Sombra,” she snarled, turning back to the Mexican hacker and swiftly seizing her by the collar of her hoodie.

     “Now, I’ll ask you one more time _. What did you do to Angela Ziegler?”_

     The syringe needle glistened, its tip hovering an inch away from Sombra’s throat. Its contents glowed ominously in the gloom. Sombra gazed into Moira’s mismatched eyes and found no light, no mirth within them. She seemed to suddenly comprehend the very real danger that she was in, and raised her hands into the air in a gesture of surrender. 

     “Alright, alright! Don’t get your panties – boxers? – briefs? - in a knot. I swear that I did nothing, and I have no idea what they did with her. All I saw was that horrible photo, and that wasn’t me. In fact, shouldn’t you know more than me? You’re on the high council, right?" 

     “What does Sanjay want?” Moira demanded. Her grip on Sombra was like iron.

     “Who knows? Not me. All I know is that he had me shipped out from the Karakorum base before the ass-crack of dawn today. I was to fly out to Oasis and find you. And make sure you got  _a little surprise present_  from him.”

     Moira narrowed her eyes. “I’m not one for surprises.”

     “Well, we’ll see about that. I was going to show you, but you’ll have to stop choking me. Unfortunately, I don’t get off on that sort of thing. Unlike you and Anya Al-Shahrani.”

_How did she – Never mind._

     Moira released Sombra, shoving her away contemptuously. The hacker stumbled and sprawled back into her rolling chair. Grimacing, but keeping her eyes fixed warily on the massive syringe still clenched in Moira’s fist, Sombra ducked under the desk and retrieved an old, tattered gray duffel bag that she must have brought in with her. She dumped it on the laboratory workbench, where it landed with a heavy  _clang._  

     “No tricks. See for yourself,” she announced.

     Moira shot her a haughty, mistrustful look before laying the syringe down, stepping forwards, and unzipping the bag with a single sharp jerk. It fell open, revealing a few scraps of twisted white metal that rolled out onto the laboratory table. For a moment, Moira only stared uncomprehendingly at the disfigured thing on her laboratory desk.

     Then - a flash of recognition, cold and sudden as falling into icy water. She inhaled sharply and reached down to grasp one piece. It was a long, slender handle grip.

_The Caduceus Staff._

     She had seen it before. Many times before, many years ago. She remembered – 

_\- white hands stained black with her lifeblood, seizing her cold palms, clasping her face, a moment of calm amid the chaos of the battlefield, the rapture of golden healing light -_

     “Well, there’s Sanjay’s little gift to you,” Sombra remarked from behind her. “Some assembly required, but I have no doubt that you’re up to the challenge.”

_The gift of healing. The gift of resurrection._

     Moira turned away from Sombra, her face half-hidden in shadow, her expression dark and unreadable. Her fist tightened into a vise grip around the staff handle, the purple veins on her right hand standing out in stark relief against her unnaturally pallid skin. A faint trickle of blood ran down her wrist, as the jagged edges of the broken piece sliced into her palm.

     The pain was sharp, cold, perversely welcome. It was all so clear to her now.

_Angela is dead._

_I am to bring her back._

     “Not so much as a thank you?” quipped Sombra. “A little favor, perhaps? You know, I did come all this way to get that to you. And do you know how hard it was to smuggle that thing through the Oasis security perimeter?”

     “Get out of my lab,” Moira snapped. “I have work to do, and time of the essence.”

     She did not look up again, not even when the laboratory doors hissed shut behind Sombra. By then, the shattered remains of the Caduceus staff were arrayed out on her workbench, each piece in its place. By then, she had already begun.

 

*****

   

> _This is your anchorwoman Olympia Shaw for ATN, bringing you the latest updates from what is now being termed “The Lijiang Incident.”_
> 
> _New developments in this story are coming quickly. It is now being said that popular humanitarian figure Dr. Angela Ziegler was involved in the clash at Lijiang Tower. According to inside sources, Ziegler had responded to Overwatch’s recall, and was among the Overwatch personnel present in Chongqing last night. As of right now, Angela Ziegler is missing in action, presumed to have been lost during the attack. Her body has not amongst the dead at Lijiang, and it is being speculated that the humanitarian doctor has been captured by agents of Talon for sinister ends._
> 
> _A mysterious unregistered dropship was seen leaving Chongqing airspace during the early hours of the morning, heading west. Security experts tell us that efforts to track the route of this ship have so far been unsuccessful, as it was equipped with powerful cloaking technology. It is theorized that Ziegler was taken away from Lijiang aboard this aircraft. The Chinese government are offering a five million renminbi reward to anyone who has information regarding the events of last night that would lead to the recovery of Dr. Ziegler, or the arrest of the perpetrators of this act of terror. If anyone of our watchers has knowledge that could be of use to the authorities, we urge you to come forwards._
> 
> _Angela Ziegler, often referred to by her callsign “Mercy,” was a much-adored figure to people all over the world. The public has taken to social media to express their grief and outrage over the tragic events of last night. Many are tweeting under the hashtags #prayforlijiang and #giveusmercy. Popular figures are also weighing in, and pop star Lúcio Correia dos Santos, better known as just “ _Lúcio_ ,” has already announced a livestream charity concert to benefit the victims of this terrorist attack._
> 
> _Says _Lúcio_ ; “Now more than ever, we must unite to show that senseless acts of violence and terror may break our hearts, but never our spirits. We will come together stronger than ever before. And Mercy is a hero to me and so many others around the world. I can only pray that she will return to us soon. After all, heroes never die.”_
> 
> _Well put, indeed. I’m Olympia Shaw and this is ATN. More on this story after the break._

*****

 

**University Gardens, Oasis, Iraq. Present Day.**

     “Korpal. It’s me.” 

     “Sombra. What is your report?”

     The freelance hacker sat cross-legged at a café table in the gardens of Oasis, tapping away at her holopad with one hand. With the other, she gently stirred a green tea frappucino with extra whipped cream. In her dark hoodie and ripped jeans, she blended in effortlessly to the throngs of college students lounging about in the Kofi Aromo and the gardens. Oasis truly was a surveillance state – everything was on camera, everything was bugged. But Sombra could program an audio and visual blind spot around herself in her sleep. Someone would come and investigate the “glitch” eventually, but by then she would be long gone.

     “It went just as you said,” she said, speaking softly into thin air. She needed no phone – the cybernetic devices in her head were more than sufficient to transmit a secure voice call. “I delivered the item to O’Deorain. Mission accomplished.” 

     “Good. We will have you back in Karakorum shortly.” 

     “For the record, she did threaten to stab me with a syringe. Just so you know. She’s so mean." 

     “You will be well rewarded for your troubles, as we agreed.”

     Sombra frowned, chewing the straw of her frappucino. “It’s just...” 

     “Yes?” prompted Sanjay.

     “Something isn’t right about this. About O’Deorain. Yes, you and I both know she can be all sorts of weird, but it’s not just that. I’ve been dealing with secrets and lies for years, and I know when something’s up. Maybe it’s all my augmentations, but I swear that I can feel it in my bones.”

     A thoughtful pause. “How do you mean?”

     Sombra took a deep breath. This was going to take some telling.

     “Okay, so here’s how it went down. This morning, you made your first call to Moira O’Deorain’s holopad at 7:49 am. No answer. You called again at 7:50. Nothing again. So at 7:51, you send her that text –  _Do I have your attention now?_ And you slap Angela Ziegler’s face on it for good measure. What does she do the minute she sees it? She destroys her holopad.”

     “She destroyed it?” This was evidently news to Sanjay. 

     “Yep. Threw it clean off the balcony of the Tower of Oasis. At the time, I assumed it was because you basically jumpscared her with her dead ex. Don’t worry, I know all about what went on between her and Ziegler all those years ago. I’ve been playing dumb about it, but it’s not even a good secret. Plus, it’s quite the horrible photo you snapped. All the wrong lighting and angles.”

     “So, she wasn’t thinking clearly,” Sanjay mused.

     Sombra frowned thoughtfully, her green tea frappucino all but forgetten. “Mmm, maybe. Or maybe she was thinking  _very_  clearly.”

     “Explain.” 

     “She threw her holopad away in a fit of passion. That’s what it looks like, and that’s what I believed at the time, too. She looked seriously fucked up over Ziegler. But, now that I’ve thought about it some more… I’m thinking that’s just what she  _wants_  us to believe.”

     Sombra paused for dramatic effect, wiggling her eyebrows to no one in particular.

     “Let’s remember who we’re dealing with here,” she said. “Moira O’Deorain? She’s always kind of a bitch to me. And I heard that she eats bunnies, or something. Does she seem like the type to suddenly break down and start throwing state-of-the-art electronics around over someone she hasn’t seen in years? Does she seem like the type to break down at all?”

     There was a thoughtful silence on the other side of the line, which Sombra took as her cue to continue. At this point, there was no turning back. 

     “Here’s the deal. I’ve been inside her holopad for days now, and I was monitoring everything. Her location, her schedule, I had it all. I even managed to get into the camera. By the way, did you know that she’s been hooking up with that other minister Al-Shahrani? Wait until you see the kinky shit they get up to,  _por dios_  -”

     “Sombra." 

     “Right. Focus. Okay. So, I was all over that holopad. But I lost her the second she chucked the damn thing off the building. I’ll admit I didn’t see that coming, and it pissed the hell out of me. It was 7:51, and right away I started hacking into Oasis’s network of security cameras to try to see what she was doing. It took me six whole minutes to get into their system – the firewalls here actually aren’t shit. Then it took me another three minutes to find her amongst everyone in the whole city. You try catching a woman who can do that black-cloud-ghosty thing. When I finally spotted her again, it was 8:00 exactly and she was in the City Center. She faded right into the rush hour crowd and made a big scene, I couldn’t possibly miss it.”

 _You would be wise not to forget who you are dealing with... Time is of the essence..._ Moira's own words rang in her mind.

     “So, she managed to lose you for nine minutes.”

     “Yeah.” Sombra gnawed her lip. The admission irked her more than she cared to admit. “At the time, I didn’t think it was even that important. I thought she was just being crazy because she was broken up about Ziegler. Didn’t cross my mind that she could have been trying to dodge me. But now..."

     “I see.”

     Sanjay’s voice was as flat and curt as ever, but his tone had changed. There was now something icy, something hard and ruthless in his words. The temperature of the café seemed to drop by twenty degrees, and the hair on the nape of Sombra’s neck stood on end.

     “Hey, who knows? Maybe seeing her Angela dead really did fuck her up,” Sombra offered. “But I play enough games with people to know when people are playing games with me. I believe the sly bunny-eater realized that she was being watched, and had to think fast. I believe she destroyed her holopad, not out of blind emotion, but to strategically buy herself a little precious time. But, time to do what?”

     Sombra took a breath before going on. She was capricious by nature, but she was no fool. An accusation against a high councilor of Talon to another high councilor was no matter to be taken lightly. She knew when she was in deep waters.

     Perhaps it would have been better to keep her mouth shut. But a secret was a secret, and she could never leave one well enough alone. 

_Time is of the essence._

     “My question is…  _what did Moira O’Deorain do in the nine minutes that we weren’t watching her?”_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been in airline hell for the last two days, trying to get to my study abroad program in England. At least I'm in London now, and I've had a lot of time to write.
> 
> This was a challenging chapter. Honestly, this work has proven to be a lot more complicated for me than I had anticipated. Also... _who is Moira O'Deorain? Who is this woman? Who is this kinky otaku nerd? Who is this awkward lovestruck heartbroken lesbian? Who is this conniving genius-intellect criminal supervillain? Who even is this person whose head I need to get into?_
> 
> A challenging character.
> 
> Find me on [DA](https://www.deviantart.com/kittify) and [Tumblr](http://seraphfic.tumblr.com/)!


	5. Moira (Never Wanted This)

_“I will rebuild you.”_

**University Laboratories, Oasis, Iraq. Present Day.**

     It had been three days. Three fateful days had come and gone since the Lijiang Incident. The sun had risen and set three times since Angela Ziegler swallowed the pretty blue pill. 

     It was time for a resurrection.

     Since Sombra delivered the Caduceus staff, Moira had not left her laboratory so much as even once. She barely ate, and did not sleep except for resting her head in her hands and closing her eyes for a few minutes at a time when exhaustion overtook her. The increasingly concerned messages from Anya that pinged into in the lab computer every couple of hours were left on read. When the mania of science came over her, Moira was a woman possessed.

     In the early hours of the third morning, her work was finally complete. 

     At long last, the Caduceus Staff hummed with life once more. Suffused with golden light, its shattered pieces had been delicately, meticulously welded together into a graceful whole. No one would know it had ever been broken – it was as good as new. Perhaps better, even. It was really a marvelous piece of technology, and the more Moira handled it, the more respect she mustered for its original creator. _She was brilliant - no._ Moira instantly corrected herself in her mind. _She_ is _brilliant. And she will be brilliant still._  

     Swathed in her white lab coat, Moira’s spindly frame was cast into relief against the bright glow of the Cadeuceus staff. With both sleeves rolled up, she grasped a surgeon’s scalpel in her right hand and gritted her teeth. 

 _I am not afraid,_ she told herself.

     And with a quick, violent motion, she slashed the blade down her left arm.

     The razor-sharp edge parted her flesh with frightening ease. Blood – dark, scarlet, blistering hot – gushed from the laceration, trickling down her hand and _drip-dripping_ down onto the pristine metal floor. Agony wracked her body like a bolt of lightning, and the scalpel dropped out of her hand with a clatter. She cried out hoarsely through clenched teeth and bent over, clutching at the wound. 

     At once, a beam of yellow light shot out of the Caduceus staff and locked onto her contorted form. And then the pain was gone, replaced with a buzzing, dizzy euphoria. Moira watched, pain-drunk, breathless, as luminous nanites cascaded around her arm and began to stitch her skin and sinew back together. In a matter of moments, the cut had disappeared and Moira dared to breathe in once more. Gingerly, she ran her fingers over the pale new skin. Not even the faintest mark remained. The only evidence that she had even been wounded in the first place was the deep black pool of her own blood shimmering on the floor.

     Moira straightened and, for the first time in three days, smiled a thin, wan smile. _Success, at last._ She rolled her sleeves back down, in the process covering a line of old, faded scars that carved up the skin of her right forearm above her withered, knotted right hand. Years ago, developing her own biotic healing grasp had not proven quite so simple.

     She had never been afraid of self-experimentation.

     Within the next few minutes, Moira had packed the Caduceus staff into an innocuous sealed laboratory transport cart – it would not do to be seen carrying about technology known to belong to the missing Angela Ziegler. Then she shed her lab coat and donned the black and violet combat apparatus. The weight of it on her shoulders was as familiar as the embrace of an old friend. 

     She did not linger. She had appointments to keep. When all was done, she left her laboratory, leaving it dark and desolate in her wake. She cast one final look back at the centrifuges, the racks of beakers and tubes, the solitary Sasuke figurine on her desk. There was a sense of finality to the way her footsteps echoed through the cold, sterile corridor. She couldn’t shake the premonition that something vast and apocalyptic was in motion, and she would not be the same when she returned.

     If she ever returned.

_If._

 

*****

 

**City Limits, Oasis, Iraq. Present Day.**

     On the far-flung fringes of the vast Arabian desert, the full moon hung low in the midnight sky. Here, by the outskirts of the suburbs, there was nothing at all. The paved concrete of Oasis ended, and vast, empty dunes of orange sand stretched into the horizon as far as the eye could see.

     Standing on the edge of the red desert, gazing into the vast beyond, Moira was consumed by an odd sense of loss and loneliness. The city of Oasis, the only home that she had known for years, was now behind her. Here, she was finally beyond the reach of the state’s cameras and listening bugs and Anya’s hard-light security perimeter. Here, for the first time in the longest time, she was well and truly alone. But it would not be for long.

     The night was black, growing blacker all the time. A line of shadows gathered on the distant horizon, creeping nearer and nearer. Moira breathed in, breathed out. Something dark and terrible was coming for her. She could feel it in her bones.

_Ghosts from her past._

     Moira had plenty of regrets, but she was also nothing if not pragmatic. She told herself that there was no use dwelling on the past and what might have been. Instead, she turned her thoughts to the long, winding path ahead.

 _Sanjay_. Moira’s lip twisted at the very thought of his name.

     Sanjay Korpal was a psychopath. Moira was not prone to hyperbole; she was certain that he was a psychopath in the literal, clinical sense. She would stake her doctorate on it. On the surface, he was the very image of corporate power and respectability; the face of the illustrious Vishkar Corporation around the world. He spoke fifteen different languages, had impeccable manners, and projected a warm, benevolent charm that allowed him to win hearts and minds with the ease of drawing flies to honey. He was a genius, an entrepreneur, a captain of industry.

     But she knew better.

     She had seen him play with fire. Once, she had glimpsed the way his eyes lit up with bloodlust when he lit a match and twirled it between his fingers. Moira was no shrinking violet; she told herself that she was afraid of nothing and no man. And yet the look on his face on that day had haunted her. He was an incurable pyromaniac – of that much, she was sure. Furthermore, his affability, his easy charm – she knew it was all fake, all tools that he wielded to manipulate lesser minds. There was something not quite human about him.

     She had heard how the Rio favela burned down after Vishkar Corporation was denied the right to build there. It had been headline news at the time; crying, disfigured children splashed across the front pages. It was not Talon business, and she had no proof. But she knew he had done.

 _And Angela Ziegler was at his mercy._  

     It made her wonder what she had gotten herself into with Talon. No one could accuse her of keeping good company these days. In her mind Korpal was the worst of them all, but the others on the high council were hardly better. Akande Ogundimu – or Doomfist, as he dramatically styled himself – was a fanatic with a twisted, grade-school understanding of Darwinism. As a geneticist, it irked Moira to no end to see the theory of evolution perverted to support his grotesque political ideology. Sometimes Moira had half a mind to straighten him out on the _real_ science behind natural selection, but the other half of her knew that it wouldn’t matter. He got off on war and conflict, and he would always find a way to justify it. 

     She was not fond of Doomfist, even though he had risen to be their de-facto leader. She bit her tongue at council meetings and often wished that Overwatch had managed to keep him behind bars. In her mind, it was a severe mark of their incompetence that he had managed to escape in the first place. Had he really managed to punch his way out of prison, the way he claimed? Were they making cells out of styrofoam these days?

     Then there was Maximilien, the inscrutable omnic financier. Moira didn’t know much about him, only that he handled the checkbooks and laundered funds through his casino in Monaco. Through various backchannels, he was the one to funnel money to her research in Oasis. Aside from that, their paths rarely crossed. 

     And finally, there was Gab – Reaper.

     The darkness in the desert night seemed to gather and come alive, drawing nearer, pooling at her feet. Her long shadow quivered as it stretched across the dunes, ghostly and black.

     Between them all, the inner council was a veritable who’s-who of misfits and monsters. _Where does that leave me?_ Moira wondered to herself, raising a hand to rub the bruise-dark circles under her eyes. Her left sleeve was spattered brown with her own dried blood.

_A mad scientist. Emphasis on the mad._

     A sudden gust of wind interrupted her wandering train of thought. High in the moonlit sky above, the incoming Talon dropship dropped its shields and shimmered into visibility with the softest of hums. The craft descended towards Moira like a sleek black beast, its rapid approach raising a gale that blew back her hair and sent the sand around her feet blasting away.

     Sombra was climbing out onto the dropship’s ramp before it had even fully extended, jumping several feet to the ground below. She sniffed the air and gave Moira and the transport cart containing the Caduceus staff a strangely judgmental look.

     “Have you left the laboratory since the last time I saw you? When was the last time you took a shower? Why do you have a cart? Why is there so much blood all over you? Did you stab someone? Oh my god, you look like a homeless person.”

     “Shut up and let’s go,” Moira growled. 

     The cockpit of the ship was as dark and shadowy as the night outside. When they boarded, Sombra made a point of sitting in the seat furthest away from her. Moira felt Sombra’s sidelong gaze upon her, and read mistrust in her every movement. As the engines of the craft roared quietly and they took off once more into the night, she looked carefully away and wondered how much the woman knew.

     Did she suspect? She must. She was cheeky, but she was smart.

     The hairs prickled on the back of Moira’s neck. She knew that Sombra was watching her closely, but she did not meet her eyes. Instead, Moira leaned back in her seat and turned to gaze out the tiny window in the dropship bay. In the far west, the glowing lights of Oasis had long since faded into the distance. The red dunes of the desert flashed by below in a blur. They were moving fast, flying across the dark desert, speeding into the unknown.

     Three days ago, with the nine minutes that she had stolen from under Sombra’s nose, Moira had set events in motion. She had done what she could.

     Now, she could only watch it all unfold.

 _"I need your help now more than ever… old friend,"_ she whispered under her breath.

*****

**Somewhere in the Karakoram Mountains. Present Day.**

_I am afraid of nothing and no man. I am not afraid of you._

     And that was what Moira told herself. She repeated it in her mind again and again, as the wind rose around them and they faced each other on the edge of the mountain, their coats whipping about in the cold night air. They were far from any city and any civilization here, deep in the dark heart of the Asian continent. Overhead, the midnight sky was littered with more stars than Moira had ever seen anywhere else in the world. 

 _I am afraid of nothing and no man. I am not afraid of you._ The bitter alpine air cut like a knife, carving twin spots of crimson into Moira’s cheeks. Her shadow flickered at her feet like an errant black flame. She said the words over and over, as if saying it enough would make it true.

     Sanjay Korpal stood opposite Moira, silhouetted by the spotlights of the landing strip. His smooth, handsome face was steeped in shadow. She could not see his eyes.

     “You look well.”

     Moira remembered that she looked like a homeless person and laughed humorlessly to herself.

     “As do you,” she replied coolly, with all the indifference she could muster.

     “I am sorry to bring you here under trying circumstances,” remarked Sanjay. “I apologize if my summons was rather abrupt. Sombra mentioned to me that you had a little accident with your holopad.”

     His voice was polite and serene as ever, his impeccable English tinged with the faintest Indian accent. And yet there was something else in it. An undeniable hint of something more sinister. Here was someone who would make a dangerous enemy. Moira held his gaze in silence, giving him a stare as cold and hard as the Karakoram winter. Her face betrayed nothing at all.

_I am afraid of nothing and no man._

     “It must be difficult, to see an old flame again.” Sanjay’s voice was as smooth as poisoned honey.

_I am not afraid of you._

     “If you think I still give a damn about Angela Ziegler,” Moira snapped, her eyes flinty and hard, “You are sorely mistaken.”

     Sanjay only smiled and opened his hands, motioning her inside with a gesture of welcome. 

     There was no turning back. There had never been a choice of turning back. Moira gripped the remade Caduceus staff in both hands and walked forwards, into the inexorable beyond.

     With a great grinding creak and crash, the great black gates of the Karakoram base yawned open for them. Moira and Sanjay stepped inside, Sombra bringing up the rear. The hired hacker had been uncharacteristically quiet throughout their whole interaction, her eyes flickering hungrily between the two inner councilors as they spoke. Moira had no doubt that she had eavesdropped on their every word.

     Inside the cavernous, steel-paneled entryway, the hulking figure of Akande Ogundimu stood waiting for them, his enormous barrel arms crossed over his chest. The Nigerian man wore a glossy black suit, and his mechanical limb glistened dully in the half-light.

     “Moira.” He nodded acknowledgement to Moira, his expression firm and neutral. Whatever their differences might be, they respected each other.

     “Akande.”

     “Welcome. It is good to have you back. It has been too long.”

     “It has indeed,” Moira retorted, impatient as ever with pleasantries. “So, take me to Angela Ziegler at once. It has been three days. Even with cryostasis, there is no precedent for a resurrection this long after death. If you want her alive again and perhaps still somewhat whole, there is no time to waste.”

     Sanjay and Akande exchanged a look and a curt nod. Then Sanjay stepped forwards, motioning her into the depths of the mountain. The four of them walked down a darkened corridor hewn from coarse gray stone, footsteps echoing in the claustrophobic gloom. The stone walls were damp and close, and  the dripping of water echoed in the distance. Moira, the tallest of the lot, had to stoop down for fear of concussing herself on the low, rough-hewn roof.

_Do we live like animals, doing our business out of a cave in the wilderness?_

     Since taking up her post as Minister of Genetics years ago, Moira had never once visited Talon’s Karakoram base. She had never needed to, as her place had always been elsewhere. Aside from their semi-regular meetings at the masquerade in Venice, she rarely left the state of Oasis. In this day and age, it was unwieldy and unnecessary to meet face-to-face when heavily encrypted messages and video conferences would more than suffice. Karakoram, a mere hour’s flight from India, was very much Sanjay Korpal’s domain. 

     So she was rendered momentarily speechless when all of a sudden, the walls, ceiling, and floor fell away, and she found herself standing at the edge of a great precipice.

     The heart of the enormous mountain was hollow as bone. A vast empty void gaped before them like a mouth poised to swallow them. Stifling a sudden sense of vertigo, Moira peered down into the depths. Only the faintest of lights glimmered in the distance far, far below, barely penetrating the deep shadows around them. The blackness stretched before her, around her, consuming her.

_I am afraid of nothing and no man._

     Sanjay raised his hand and a small square platform of blue hard-light shimmered into existence, extending into the chasm before them. He stepped onto it, and Moira followed with only the slightest hint of hesitation. Doomfist and Sombra followed in her wake. Beneath their feet, the surface felt as warm and solid as any floor. Sanjay made a graceful, dancing gesture with his palm and slowly, the hard-light platform began to descend into the abyss.

     Moira frowned to herself as the entryway dwindled into the shadows high above them. A sense of unease was quickly building in her gut. If Sanjay’s hard-light elevator was the only means in and out of his place, then she could not leave until he allowed her to. She had not anticipated that. It would be… inconvenient.

 _I am not afraid of you,_ she told him in her mind.

     Nearly a minute passed. The wind rushed past them as they plunged further and further down. Soon, however, the lights at the bottom drew nearer, and their descent slowed to match. Upon reaching the bottom, they stepped off the elevator and found themselves in a rudimentary laboratory filled with various hologram displays and hard-light panels. It was nothing like Moira’s underground lab in Oasis, but she was a geneticist, not an architech. This was evidently Sanjay’s lair. 

     The center of the floor was dominated by a massive, glowing machine. The hulking device gave off a low hum that seemed to shake the very bedrock beneath them. A hundred different multicolored wires twisted and wound away across the floor. It was a cryo-pod. 

_Angela. Angela is here._

     The realization came as suddenly as a thunderclap. It had been so long, so very long since Moira had last seen her. And yet there she was. All at once, dread filled Moira’s throat. She could not breathe. She could not think.

     And yet she stepped towards the cryo-pod, drawn onwards by that strange sense of inevitability deep within her soul. If Moira had been a more sentimental person, she might have called it fate.

_I am afraid –_

     She did not want to look, and yet she looked.

_Oh god._

     Angela Ziegler, pale-faced through the window of the pod. Lips tinged blue with frost, blonde hair spilling about her head like a golden halo, the Valkyrie suit cracked and dented around her broken form. Dried black rivulets of blood on her lips. Her eyes were closed in something that resembled peaceful slumber. Looking at her, Moira was suddenly reminded of –

_\- so many weary years ago. Angela, exhausted, vulnerable, falling asleep in her arms on quiet mornings when there was nothing but the quiet drumming of rain on the roof and the sound of her slow breathing, her heart beating –_

_\- except that Angela wasn’t asleep and she wasn’t breathing and her heart wasn’t beating and they weren’t lovers anymore, not after that fateful night when everything had gone up in flames, and she wasn’t asleep because she was dead, she was dead and Moira had blood on her hands and everything was lost and everything was bloody and Angela was -_

_beautiful_

_a dead thing_

     “An angel in the flesh,” Sanjay remarked, spreading his arms and smiling a beatific smile.

     In that moment, for the first time that night, Moira’s ironclad composure cracked and she decided that she hated him. She hated his cunning eyes and his empty manners and all his shining architech toys. She hated him with more fury than she had ever mustered for anyone else in her life. In that moment, she looked at him with blind rage in her eyes and wished for all the world that she could reach out with her withered right hand and tear the life from his slender worthless throat.

     She hated him for the corpse of Angela Ziegler. 

     Sanjay gazed back at her impassively, his expression unreadable.

     Moira was the first to look away, gripping the Caduceus staff with white knuckles. “Open the pod,” she commanded. Her voice sounded detached and alien to her own ears. The shadows around her gathered and reared, thick, black, nearly solid. 

     Pulling up a hologram screen, Sanjay tapped a few keys. Slowly, the heavy lid of the cryo-pod thrummed and hissed open, releasing a great cloud of opaque white mist.

     Before the freezing mist could disperse, Moira stepped up to the pod and leaned over Angela. For a few precious seconds, she was shielded from the prying gazes of the other Talon members. In that wild, fleeting moment, she raised her hand and gently touched Angela’s pallid cheek, brushing a few wayward threads of hair from her face. 

_It’s okay. I’ll live._

_Is that a promise?_

_Please, don’t cry._

     She mouthed the words to the memory. _25 mL Benzodiazepine, 1L hydrogen cyanide, 20mL Phenobarbital._ It had been so long ago.

     And then the mist faded, taking the remembrance of summer night away with it. There she was, years later, eons older, poised over Angela’s frozen corpse at the bottom of an abyss in the cold, dark heart of a mountain. She felt four sets of eyes upon her, watching her every move.

     “Well?” Akande Ogundimu prompted her. 

     Moira raised the Caduceus staff in her hands. All of a sudden, it felt so heavy that she could barely lift it. But there was no turning back. Even in the stony mountain halls and the dropship over the desert, in her secret laboratory and the Tower of Oasis, there had never been a choice of turning back. She had come, and she would resurrect Angela Ziegler. She did not believe in fate, and yet this was fate.

      “Heroes never die,” she breathed.

          and then -

_a storm of light, the staff vibrating in her palms in answer_

_the scent of lightning, thunder, ozone in the air_

_Angela’s still form shrouded in blinding gold_

_they would take her_

_from death_

_and this was the price of rebirth_

_\- Oh god, will she want to see me again? It has been so many long, terrible years since we were together and this isn’t what she wanted, she chose to end it all, she didn’t choose me and I am bringing her back against her will and she will hate me and I never wanted this, I never wanted this –_

     Angela Ziegler opened her eyes. They were so very blue.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FBI: so it says here that you’re supporting a 48-year-old terrorist leader based in Iraq.  
> me: yeah  
> FBI: miss, we’re going to have to take you into custody.  
> me: wait
> 
> Thank you so much for >100 kudos! I'm so grateful for all the support so far. Find me on [DA](https://www.deviantart.com/kittify) and [Tumblr](http://seraphfic.tumblr.com/)!


	6. Moira (Interlude)

_“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”_

**Somewhere near Gibraltar. Eight years ago.**

_“…I heard you the first time.”_

     In another life, they would be gentle with each other. In another life, they would have more time.

     But this was the only life they had and they were not gentle people. They had seen too much of the world to be gentle and although their kiss started out slow and tender, it soon grew into something devouring. All at once the night was in motion and their hands were on each other and they could not stop. Angela’s fingers twisted through Moira’s russet hair, pressing her down onto the soft green grass. Moira sank her teeth into the other woman’s lower lip and bit down –

     Angela gasped in pain, her eyes flying wide. They were so very blue.

     They were drinking in the open air, drinking each other in on that hill by the banks of the midnight Mediterranean Sea. The clear black sky was studded with silver stars and Moira’s pale skin was stippled with dark freckles, her white shirt pulled off and cast to the side in the bushes –

     Angela’s nails raked down the jagged ribs of her naked back and Moira thought she must have drawn blood. It _hurt_ , hurt like hell, not just the physical pain of it but also the cruel knowledge of how fleeting and precious this moment was, how soon it would all be over and they would be forced back to a reality filled with awkward silences and averted eyes. And Angela would still be depressed and Moira would still be watching her from the shadows, watching her drown, wanting to help her but not knowing how –

     She pushed those thoughts away, resolving that she would not ruin today with thoughts of tomorrow. Instead, she lost herself in the hollow between Angela’s collarbones, in the warmth of her body as she ran her hands over Angela's jeans, over her thighs. Angela clung to her as if she were drowning, kissed her as if she were dying of thirst, looked at her as if Moira was her salvation –

 _I want to save you,_ Moira mouthed silently, her lips pressed into the curve of Angela’s bared throat. _Please, let me save you._

But she didn’t say that, because she knew better. Angela Ziegler was the one who saved people, and never in a million years would she would ever admit that she needed saving herself. Instead, Moira’s thin wrists quivered as she fumbled with the buttons of Angela’s blouse, struggling to undo them in the gathered shadows. Angela’s hands wandered all over her body, her fingers catching on Moira’s belt.

     “Do you want this?” Moira breathed. “Do you want me, too?”

     Somewhere, in the sultry depths of the Mediterranean night, her usual aloof demeanor had fallen away. Her pretensions, her vanity, her brilliant mind – they were all gone, withered to rust and stardust. She was left with nothing but her raw self. Her burning skin and her aching soul were laid bare. It terrified her beyond words.

     “If you want me to stop -” she whispered hesitantly, her nerves fraying, her voice shaking –

     All of a sudden she felt Angela’s hand under her chin, bringing Moira’s gaze upwards to meet hers. Their eyes met. Blue and red melted away to gray in the inky darkness.

     “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”

 _My god, she’s beautiful._ Moira thought again, her heart overfull. _She is so beautiful and good and this is beautiful and good and I don’t deserve this, I don’t deserve her_ –

     And then Angela’s hand crept between Moira’s legs, finding the crotch of her pants and pressing down hard. The sudden, sweet flash of pleasure sent Moira’s mind reeling into the void. She gasped for air, and thought no more.

     It was dreamlike, the moon on the sea and the heady summer wind tangling their hair. Dreamlike, the way they moved, the way they pulled each other nearer and kissed with tears in their eyes and fire beneath their skin. They tore at their clothes and bit soft purple bruises into each other’s necks. Angela’s shirt was cast away onto the grass beyond, her bra soon following suit. Moira’s breath hitched when she caught sight of Angela’s breasts spilling free.

     Gently, ever so gently, she reached out and cupped them in her hands. She ran her tongue over one dark, stiff nipple and relished in the soft moan of pleasure that fell from Angela’s lips.

     It was all so very dreamlike, and Moira’s blood ran cold with the fear that at any moment, she might wake and find herself in her bedroom or slumped over at her laboratory desk at Gibraltar base, alone, with nothing to show for herself but heavy circles around her eyes and a burning, shameful wetness between her legs.

_Don’t think of that now. Don’t think –_

     Moira bit down –

     Angela cried out from between clenched teeth –

     For one night, they were not Dr. Ziegler and Dr. O’Deorain, peerless scientists forever at odds. They were Angela and Moira, two fundamentally lonely souls seeking some elusive affirmation of life in each other.

     Angela shed her shirt and undid the zipper of her jeans, kicking them off to the side and at long last there was nothing between them, nothing but wild heat and delirious desire. Moira pressed her down onto her back in the soft grass, straddling her with bony knees and kissing an apology into the pink mark she had left on Angela’s tender skin.

     Tonight, she wanted so desperately to please. She wanted to feel Angela’s breathing catch, feel the blonde doctor moaning her name –

     “ _Oh_ …” Angela gasped, biting her lip as Moira’s mouth tightened across her breast once more.

 _Yes._ The sounds she made sent a shiver of delight coursing down Moira’s spine. She dared to move lower, kissing a gleaming trail down Angela’s bared stomach, lips lingering for just a moment on the pointed ridge of her hip. Angela’s body was unmarked and smooth; a feast of milk and honey. Yet Moira knew all too well that some wounds were invisible, festering deep beneath the skin. Some scars, even time could not heal.

 _Be gentle,_ she told herself, hoping that she still had it in herself to. Her palms were rough and callused. Her hands had wrought nothing but violence for years on end. But tonight, she would learn to heal. For Angela’s sake.

     Moira dipped two fingers below the waistband of Angela’s panties and _oh god_ she was wet. She was all heat and blooming wetness and if Moira entertained any lingering doubts about how badly Angela wanted this – wanted _her_ \- they were quickly laid to rest by how she was bucking her hips up against Moira’s faintest touch.

     She pulled Angela’s underwear off in one fluid motion, throwing it away onto the grass beyond. She cupped a hand around the sensuous curve of Angela’s rear and pushed her fingers further, deeper. Angela shivered with wanting, wrapping her legs around Moira’s slender shoulders and moaning long and low into the night -

     “Ahh – yes – _please_ -”

     Moira bowed her head, her heart fluttering as Angela’s fingers carded through her tousled hair. She closed her eyes, breathed, opened her mouth -

     Angela tasted soft, heady, sweet, all jasmine nectar and lily-of-the-valley and deep forest and dripping spring dew.

     “… _Moira_ ,” she moaned, long and low.

     She was perfect, ever so perfect.

 _Mine._ The thought rose to the surface of Moira’s mind, unbidden, forbidden. Instinctively she flinched from the dark, painful weight of it. _No._ Angela was not hers, would likely never be hers. Angela was peace and healing and rainless blue sky. Moira was war and loneliness and choking wildfire smoke. But that did not stop her from wanting, _wanting_ ever so badly –

_Mine, for a moment. For one night. No more._

     And perhaps that would be enough.

     Gently, ever so gently, Moira lapped her tongue against Angela’s womanhood and thrust her fingers deeper, finding a rhythm that made Angela whine and rise to meet it.

     Dreamlike, the way they joined together. Dreamlike, the way the sea rose with the coming tide and their bodies intertwined in the light of the stars.

     Moira – bent over - on her knees - as if in prayer – tongue on Angela – _in_ Angela –

          making love –

_fucking –_

                    under the gaze of the round yellow moon.

     Angela came with a breathy cry, head thrown back, wild and shameless and in that moment so very _alive._ Her hands fisted in the grass, in Moira’s hair, pressing her closer, and in that moment Moira closed her eyes and breathed in and wished that Angela would never let her go.

     This wasn’t love. This was an affirmation of life. Nothing more. But nothing less.

     Then, at last, too soon, Angela’s grip loosened and Moira looked up at her through the tousled red strands of her hair. Their eyes met.

     She was perfect – _no._

     But she wasn’t perfect, Moira realized. In the far-flung recesses of her mind, she had always thought of Angela as perfect, a paragon of science and medicine and scholarly virtue. But now she realized that she was wrong. Angela’s hair was tangled in the wind, her bare feet streaked with dirt, her eyes glassy with exhaustion and unshed tears. She was the kind of woman who gave all that she was to others and left nothing for herself. Seeing Angela like this, laid open and vulnerable, stirred something deep within the cold, silent depths of Moira’s heart.

     She was no angel. She was human and hurting and imperfect and alive and _so very beautiful._

 _There is so much beauty in this world,_ Angela had said as the sun was setting. _And maybe, just maybe, this world is still worth fighting for._

 _You are worth fighting for,_ Moira thought to herself. _Damn the world. Damn the rest of humanity and their bloody, mindless wars. They can burn in hell for all I care. But you… you will always be worth fighting for._

Their eyes met, blue and blue, blue and red. In that single shared look, they said more than they ever could with mere words.

“Moira,” Angela whispered, raising her up, caressing her shoulders, kissing her neck, her cheek, her thin mouth. “Moira, please, let me make you feel good.”

     She was always so selfless, always so eager to give. Moira looked at Angela, naked, on her knees in the long grass, and could do nothing but nod assent. She gulped, looked up into the cloudless heavens as Angela pressed her down onto her back, her hands fumbling with her belt, her zipper, and _oh god_ , it had been so terribly long since anyone had touched her like this. And then all of a sudden it felt so good that Moira would have forgotten her own name if Angela wasn’t moaning it in her ear.

_You can take me. You can have me, if you want. You can have all that I am._

     Minutes, hours, eons passed unnoticed. The world spun. The night turned. Moira was blind to it all, blind to everything but the woman astride her, _inside_ her.

     “Yes,” she moaned shamelessly, three shots of whiskey on her breath. “More, _please_ -”

     She was begging for more – begging for _mercy_ –

     When at long last Moira came undone it was with a soft, strangled moan, the taste of Angela’s name on her lips. She gasped for air, arched her long back in the throes of ecstasy, and for a moment the world fell away and all was starlight.

     If this was a dream, then she never wanted to wake. If this was madness, then she never wanted anything more.

     And in the cold, empty years to come Moira would drink too much red wine and relive this memory, turning it over in her mind again and again like the pages of a well-worn book. Because even if the world went to ruin and the rest of her life was nothing more than despair, at least she’d had that one rapturous night filled with sea and stars. At least, she had known what it felt like to have just one moment of perfect happiness.

     It was only in that moment that she could admit it, the raw, bloody truth of it all. She was in love with Angela. She loved Angela, had loved her in the sweet, soft twilight as they wandered over the hill, had loved her in the sleazy bar as they sat in silence over unfinished whiskeys. She had loved her in the office, when they had first slung words like knives at each other and then Angela fallen to her knees, in tears, driven to the darkest depths of anguish –

 _25 mL Benzodiazepine, 1L hydrogen cyanide, 20mL Phenobarbital._  

     And Moira had struck Angela across the face because she had been afraid. Because a wild, nameless terror had welled up from the blackness of her unworthy heart to seize her in its grasp. Because in that moment, that awful moment, she realized how close she had come to losing her.

     She loved Angela in a way that terrified her. She loved her like no other.

     She had loved her all this time.

     

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> //coughs  
>  _affirmative consent is hot_
> 
> Apologies for the lateness, but you would not believe the hecking _journey_ this chapter went on. I swear to you that part of this was written in Oxford, in London, in Amsterdam, in Munich, in Austria, in Venice, in Switzerland, in Paris, in London again, and now in San Francisco. 
> 
> I love feedback! Find me on [DA](https://www.deviantart.com/kittify) and [Tumblr](http://seraphfic.tumblr.com/)!


	7. Angela (In Another Life)

_“This is not your time.”_

 

**Somewhere.**

     All was quiet and well.

     The Gibraltar night was mild and yet she dared not sleep, for she feared what dreams might come. She lay very still, her head on Moira’s bare chest, watching fireflies blink in and out of life above. She listened to the rise and fall of Moira’s slow breathing and tried to match it.

 _Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe._  

     Still, sleep eluded her. All was well, except within the depths of her own mind.

     Ever so gently, she extricated herself from a tangle of limbs and left Moira curled up in the long grass, dozing soundly under the dreaming sky. She looked at her crumpled, sleeping form, and felt something soften within her at the way strands of tousled ginger hair fell into the scientist’s freckled face. Moira and her freckled skin, bony shoulders hunched beneath the cover of her white shirt. Moira and her slim arms dotted with track marks. Moira, here, with her.

     She was always so sharp, so hard and exacting in her voice and manner. But in sleep the frown lines on her brow eased, and the cold formality of her demeanor was all but gone. Now, there was something quiet and delicate about her. Her arms almost felt like home.

     How lovely it was, to run away with her for a night. To forget the world, and forget herself. Perhaps, in another life, they would have more time.

     “Thank you,” she whispered aloud. ““For tonight. For being good to me. I have seen your soul, Moira O’Deorain, and you are better and kinder than you know.”

     Angela leaned down and kissed her lover’s brow.

     “Good night, my darling.”

     And then she walked away, without an idea of where she was going. Her feet took her towards the sound of the ocean. Angela Ziegler found herself standing naked at the edge of the dark Mediterranean Sea, watching the azure waves crash one by one. Tall and ghostly, the enormous Rock of Gibraltar loomed in the distance behind her. The heavens were studded with silver stars, and an arc of pink and violet clouds on the eastern horizon heralded the coming dawn. The colors of the open sky were reflected perfectly in the calm, flat mirror of the sea.

     It was so beautiful, too beautiful.

_Am I dead, or only dreaming?_

     She stepped forwards, wading in until she was chest-deep in the rising tide. The waves lapped soothingly at the bruises on her thighs, the lingering bite marks on her breasts. She trailed her fingers in the soft, warm water and tipped her head back to gaze at the starlit sky above. She knew the constellations by heart.

     There was Hercules, and Sagittarius, and Scorpio. Her mother had named them to her, back home in Switzerland, so many years ago. Her brilliant mother, the CERN astrophysicist, who taught her precocious daughter to love science and learning and the infinite universe above. Her mother, the first Dr. Ziegler, who had been one of the first to fall when the Omnics came to Geneva. 

     The stars felt so near tonight.

     “Are you still there?” Angela whispered aloud. “Are you watching over me?”

     There was no answer. There never was any answer.

     Angela laughed quietly, sadly to herself. Of course, there would be no answer. Her life was so small, so insignificant, a fleeting blink in the grand scheme of a universe cold and vast and indifferent. Of course, her prayers would go unheard. Her mother was long gone. Marie Ziegler had never believed in heaven, or God, or angels. And neither did her daughter.

 _You feel too much, too deeply,_ said the part of her mind that spoke in her mother’s voice. _You take up burdens that are not yours to bear._

     Perhaps it was her mother’s death that led Angela on her relentless drive to master death itself. Through nanobiotics and healing technology, she had learned to bring people back from the beyond. She would work miracles the likes of which she could hardly believe. But no matter how many lives she saved on the battlefield, it was never enough. It was always far too late for her mother.

     After death – nothing but empty, starless void.

     The thought used to frighten her.

     Angela took a deep breath and dived forwards, falling into the depths of the dark sea. The waves closed over her head, and silence pressed against her ears. The water was cool and black and empty. Her silvery blonde hair fanned out around her like a halo. Above her head, the reflection of the full moon glimmered on the choppy, mirrorlike surface of the water, drawing further and further away. She sank towards a bottom that was not there.

     Her lungs ached for air. Her blood roared in ears. 

     She could not bring herself to care about drowning. She had already been drowning for the longest time. Now, she only prayed for oblivion.

     Her heartbeat echoed in her chest, growing ever more distant and still. 

     How strange it must be, to spend just a moment without the chaos of her own thoughts and bloodsoaked memories. How wonderful, to not feel any pain, to not feel anything. To forget it all.

_Mama, is this what it feels like to die?_

     She closed her eyes. If this was only a dream -

_I don’t want to wake up._

_I don’t want to wake up._

_I don’t want –_

*****

**Talon Base, Karakoram Mountains. Present day.**

     She awoke all at once, in a storm of golden light. 

     She opened her eyes in the cavernous mountain hall. Blinked once, twice. Dragged her first gulp of air into ragged, cold lungs that ached with disuse. Screamed silently at the burn of ice and fire in her frozen veins. Felt her reignited heartbeat throb within the too-tight confines of her chest. The universe spun slowly around her, a blur of color and a cacophony of echoing sound. 

     It hurt, to be seized from the warm, soft darkness and birthed into the blinding light of the world. It hurt so very badly to breathe. 

_This was the price of rebirth._

     Her vision focused slowly, and she slowly became aware of the four people who loomed over her. A hulking, broad-shouldered African in a bespoke suit, his right hand gleaming silver and gold. A graceful Indian man, wearing a pale blue visor to shield his face. A gamine young woman, her hair dyed shades of blue and purple. And a tall, slender woman with a sharp face and an even sharper stare, clad all in funereal black, half-hidden in gathered shadow.

     Blue eyes met eyes of red and blue. For a breathless moment, they stared at one another in silence.

     “Where am I?” Angela slurred through cracked, blue-tinged lips. “Who are you?” Her mouth was bone-dry, her throat so hoarse and weak that her words were barely audible. Her voice was that of a stranger.

     “Welcome back, Angela,” rumbled the big man with the metal fist.

_Angela._

     “… Angela?” she whispered. 

     “… Is that my name?”

    They stared back at her, momentarily stunned into silence.

     “She doesn’t remember,” cried the tall woman in anguished realization, turning away and running a hand through her fiery hair. “Oh god, she doesn’t remember!”

     The Indian man stepped around her and came closer to peer very deliberately into her gaze. “Hello there,” he said, his manner so very friendly and patient. He had a calming, charming way about him that was all too easy to trust. “My name is Sanjay. Do you remember anything that happened? Anything at all?”

     Angela shook her head. Sanjay's light brown pupils glistened like pools of golden honey.

     “Really? You remember nothing?”

     Like a hint of poison, there was the faintest trace of suspicion in his sweet voice. Angela only shook her head again. “Nothing,” she repeated, her eyes blue and blank.

     Behind him, the burly African man crossed his arms, his face craggy and unreadable. The woman with the colorful hair hid a silent grin behind a gloved hand, seeming amused at the proceedings. Beyond them all, the tall, thin woman paced feverishly, her expression bleak. She twisted a long white staff in her mangled hands. Around her, the ghostly shadows in the room ebbed and flowed like agitated smoke.

_\- her white-blonde hair wrapped about a thin, long-fingered fist -_

     Angela blinked, flinched, and the fragment of memory slipped away like a waking dream.

     “That’s okay. It’s all going to be perfectly okay,” said Sanjay reassuringly, his bedside manner becoming impeccable once more. He placed a hand on her shoulder. His touch was calloused, dry, cold. She shivered reflexively, even though she was sitting on a bed of ice. 

     “Just know that we’re here to help you. You’re safe here, with us. You’re going to get better. We’re going to help you get better.” 

     She nodded faintly, and let him take her hand and raise her into a sitting position. Even that small movement made her vision blur and her stomach go weak. Looking about, she saw that she was perched inside a massive gray machine that hummed with cold energy and spilled clouds of white fog onto the surrounding floor. _A cryo-pod._

     “How are you feeling?” Sanjay asked solicitously.

     “Faint,” she confessed, licking her cracked, dried lips. In another life, she would have hated how weak and helpless she sounded. Looking down, she suddenly realized that she was clad in a suit of filthy, dented white armor. Trickles of days-old blood stained the collar and chestplate.

 _\- blood, blood and oceans, oceans of blood, oceans of blue, little blue pills –_  

     “ _Mein Gott,_ what happened to me?”

     Sanjay did not answer at once, instead momentarily stepping out of view to the side of the cryo-pod. He soon returned and graciously offered her a plastic cup of water. Angela drank gratefully, gulping it down. The tepid fluid was soothing to her swollen tongue and parched throat. Drops spilled down her chin. It tasted like nothing at all.

     “Thank you,” she murmured. 

     He waited until she had finished the entire cup before speaking again.

     “You had a terrible accident, Angela. There was a great battle, and you were lost in the aftermath. You lay dead for three days - but we were still able to save you.”

 _Three days._ It took her a moment to understand him. When she did, a pit of dreadful realization coalesced in the empty depths of her stomach. _I was dead for three days. Will I ever be whole again?_

     “We placed you into cryo-stasis,” Sanjay continued, gesturing at the pod that Angela sat in. “And now, we brought you back. With the scientific efforts of Moira here -" 

     “ - _Where did she go?”_

     All at once Sanjay’s face hardened, his voice changing in the blink of an eye from soothing comfort to an angry, strident demand. Angela jumped, whipping around in surprise.

     The red-haired woman had disappeared without trace.

     She had been there one moment, and then she was gone. It was as if she had vanished into mist, as if the shadows themselves had merged to claim her and spirit her away into the recesses of the cavern. Behind them, their two onlookers uttered exclamations of shock and annoyance. 

     “I shall go and find her,” declared the burly African man, making as if to leave.

     “That won’t be necessary, Akande. Leave her be. It matters not,” Sanjay muttered through tight lips. “She can’t get far. Not without my hard-light elevator.” He turned back to Angela. His voice became calm and smooth once more, and yet a sharp crease furrowed his brow, betraying his inner furor. 

     “Who was she?” she whispered. “Who is Moira?”

     Sanjay wet his mouth, and spoke with the air of a man who was choosing his words with care. “No one, Angela.”

_Moira -_

     “I remember something,” Angela said slowly. “Something about her. I knew her.” 

     “Really?” He watched her very closely. “What do you remember about her?”

     She put her face in her hands and pressed the palms of her hands hard against her eyes. Blots of color coalesced in front of her vision, whirling and slipping away like the threads of memory she was trying so desperately to grasp.

 _\- long fingers, sharp nails, a hard slap across her face that sent all her thoughts flying -_  

     “I think she hit me, once. A long time ago. It hurt.”

     She looked up at him again. Sanjay's eyes glinted silver behind the glow of his visor. She could read nothing there.

     “She’s no one to you, Angela,” he said, his voice as honeyed and kind as ever before. “I will keep her away from you. She won’t hurt you anymore.”

 _Trust me,_ his gentle face seemed to say. So she nodded blankly, and put the thought of the woman in black out of her mind. It felt easier that way. Something about Moira’s face made her want to remember, and remembering hurt. Her head swam when she tried to think.

     Too late, she realized that something was wrong. She couldn’t think. The world swam in and out of focus before her. Her mind was growing heavy, so heavy. Her ears buzzed. Her thoughts scattered into a million swarming pieces, rippling and flickering like sunlight on ocean waves. 

 _\- the full moon tide on the Mediterranean, a silent sky full of stars -_

     As if from afar, she watched herself tipping, falling, collapsing backwards. Sanjay caught her limp form in his arms and steadied her in his grasp. She felt his cold, callused hand caress her chin, bringing it upwards.

     “ _What was in the water?”_ she slurred brokenly. Her own voice echoed in her head, as if coming from far away. “ _The water you gave me._ _What did you put in it?”_

     “Shh,” he whispered. “Sleep. You’re safe now. We’ll keep you safe.”

 _Who are you?_ she tried to say, but then her eyes rolled upwards and the blackness yawned up from beneath her to swallow her alive. It was strangely welcome, like the familiar embrace of an old friend. Sleep was like dying, only it didn’t hurt.

     She almost didn’t see it when Sanjay slipped a glowing blue collar of hard light around her neck.

     

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Story note: Sanjay has all of Symmetra's powers and then some._
> 
>  
> 
> For someone who writes this much about Moira, it’s kind of weird that I don’t play her more. I play a fair bit of Mercy, but only when there’s no healer and no one wants to switch off. Which happens a lot. And then I die a lot. 
> 
> anyway  
> ya girl a bastion main
> 
> Find me on [DA](https://www.deviantart.com/kittify) and [Tumblr](http://seraphfic.tumblr.com/)!


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